A Crown for Cold Silver by Alex Marshall (pseudonym of Jesse Bullington)

A Crown for Cold Silver is a big, brassy, gut-buster of a fantasy, weighing in at over 650 pages. Alex Marshall has crafted a multi-layered tale (or song, if you prefer the parlance of The Star) of bloody vengeance, personal glory, and the unimaginable consequences of a single careless wish. Clear your calendar, stock up on snacks, and silence the phone — this is a serious investment of time, but one which is well worth your attention.

A Crown for Cold Silver opens with the massacre of an entire village. Kypck is a little town at the foot of the Kumbutan mountain range, and for murky reasons that only grow more complicated as the book unfolds, the Fifteenth Cavalry of the Crimson Empire has arrived to murd... Read More

A Blade of Black Steel by Alex Marshall

Alex Marshall‘s A Blade of Black Steel (2016), the sequel to A Crown for Cold Silver, continues turning the sword-and-sorcery genre on its head while displaying Marshall’s obvious love of both swords and sorcery. Character development is the key this time around, much to the enrichment of the novel itself and the series as a whole. But don’t get too complacent — the entire world may be coming to an end, after all.

Warning: there will be some mild spoilers for A Crown for Cold Silver.

Following the disastrous events at the end of A Crown for Cold Silver, Cobalt Zosia and four of her Five Villain... Read More

A War in Crimson Embers by Alex Marshall

Fair warning: if you haven’t read the previous two novels in Alex Marshall’s CRIMSON EMPIRE trilogy, A Crown for Cold Silver and A Blade of Black Steel, you aren’t going to have any understanding for what’s happening in A War in Crimson Embers (2017). It’s vitally important that these books are read in order!

At the close of A Blade of Black Steel, the members of the new Cobalt Company were, largely, scattered to the four winds. Sullen of the Horned Wolf Clan, Princess-turned-General Ji-hyeon’s former Virtue Guard Keun-ju... Read More