Seven Blades in Black

Starred review from February 25, 2019
Sykes (the Bring Down Heaven trilogy) launches his Grave of Empires trilogy with this rollicking, moving fantasy epic of revenge and magic, and the price they demand of one battle-scarred gunslinger. Sal the Cacophony has been arrested by the uncompromising revolutionary government. While awaiting her execution, Sal is given one last chance to tell the truth about her past and the lives she has claimed. But rather than providing a straightforward confession, Sal tells her captors about her journeys through the Scar, a wasteland devastated by two empires, with only her gun and her winged mount for companionship. Raised as a mage, Sal survived the agony of having her magic ripped away and now lives only to kill the 33 wizards who betrayed her. In a world where magic steals pieces of its users’ souls, Sal has learned to give up everything, even love itself, to fulfill her quest, so telling a few lies to her captors about her sins seems almost easy. With skillful worldbuilding, unexpected humor, and characters real enough to touch, this is easily Sykes’s best book to date.

April 1, 2019
Sal the Cacophony is an outlaw, a bounty hunter, and angling to be a legend in her own time. Governor-Militant Tretta Stern needs information on a massacre and the disappearance of one of her soldiers, so she offers Sal leniency?a swifter execution?if she gets those answers. Sal knows how to spin a tale that is sprawling, entertaining, and keeps raising questions. She is out for revenge?she has a list?but revenge is never a simple business, what with the other people involved, and then there's the rebellion that started everything. Sal isn't the most reliable of narrators, but since her life is on the line, every bit of embroidery is entirely forgivable. Details about the world, from past politics to current conflict, are dropped in when they're dramatically appropriate for Sal's story; which is to say, there is a lot, and the whole picture takes time to come into focus. Even the executioner, skeptical as she is, delays the execution until she knows as much of the story as Sal will tell. That there are sequels planned is great news for the reader.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

Starred review from April 1, 2019
Another ultraviolent doorstopper opens the Grave of Empires fantasy trilogy, from the author of God's Last Breath (2017, etc.). Welcome to the Scar, a continent ravaged by the vicious and seemingly endless war between the elitist Empire and the egalitarian Revolution. To this once beautiful land came the famous Sal the Cacophony riding a giant bird named Congeniality. She carried a sword named Jeff, a sentient but bloodthirsty gun named, yes, the Cacophony, with whom she's made some sort of deal, and a must-kill list of seven renegade mages. Later, as the story opens, somehow the Revolution has captured her. So to delay being executed she explains why she came to the Scar and what she did there. Her captors listen since one of their own soldiers is involved. She wanted revenge, obviously, but the details won't be disclosed for several hundred gore-soaked pages. We do wonder, though, if her will, indomitable though it may be, is stronger than the magics arrayed against her and if she's blinded herself to anything beyond retribution. All this evolves naturally out of the gritty, well-developed background, Sal's persuasive and involving backstory, and Sykes' intriguing ideas on how and why magic works here and how it's wielded. The characters are larger than life--they have to be to handle the flashes of black humor and profanity-laden dialogue. If you hadn't guessed, the action's ferocious, bloody, and unrelenting--but no matter how loud the explosions or piercing the screams, the antagonists always have time for a merry quip, a stinging rejoinder, or a philosophical discursion. While the author's previous offerings have often proven hollow at the center, with disappearing plots and long, soggy passages, this one's compulsive from start to finish. All in all, something of a breakthrough. Will Sykes sustain it?

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