What I find most interesting about this book is the sense of progress. Promise of Blood is not a book focused on just one era, just one idea, but rather a book that’s focused on progression from one to the next. Some sections seem influenced by Poirot more than anyone else. Yet that flavour isn’t the only one – there are also significant sections that are epic fantasy, questing out across unwelcoming lands. Flintlock fantasy sets it to around that era anyway, but the plotting, double crossing and violence are the Terror all over again. It’s a setting and a situation that is heavily influenced by the French revolution. Tamas has to hold the country together in the chaos, while his son hunts for the remaining threats from the old regime, and a retired detective searches for traitors to the new one. There is blood splashed across the cobblestones, open warfare in the streets, and a foreign army approaching. Field Marshal Tamas has killed the king, deposed the aristocracy, and defied the gods. The common people are organising into trade unions, magic mixes with musket fire on battlefields, and a new rival to the power of the mages is rising. The book is set in a society in flux – it was once exactly what you’d expect from the genre, with wizards and magical cities and monsters in the high passes, but all of that is changing. Brian McClellan’s book is a book in which a typical fantasy world is updating, progressing.

It’s flintlock fantasy, so the technology is different, but that’s only part of it. Promise of Blood (book one of the Powder Mage trilogy) is fantasy, but not standard fantasy – not fantasy of the expected pattern.

Promise of blood review reddit