Priest of Bones by Peter McLean

I received this book for free from NetGalley to facilitate my review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

"The first in an unmissable series, Priest of Bones is a fresh and compelling take on grimdark fantasy. Mashing together soldiers, gangsters, magic and war into a heady mix that is a hulking big brother to The Lies of Locke Lamora."--Anna Stephens, author of Godblind
The war is over, and army priest Tomas Piety heads home with Sergeant Bloody Anne at his side. But things have changed while he was away: his crime empire has been stolen and the people of Ellinburg--his people--have run out of food and hope and places to hide. Tomas sets out to reclaim what was his with help from Anne, his brother, Jochan, and his new gang: the Pious Men. But when he finds himself dragged into a web of political intrigue once again, everything gets more complicated.
As the Pious Men fight shadowy foreign infiltrators in the back-street taverns, brothels, and gambling dens of Tomas's old life, it becomes clear:
The war is only just beginning.

It took me a good long time to read this book. I started reading it and I would stop, then I’d try to start it again. Then I decided to just buckle down and read the book. I have to say it was a pretty darn good book.

I wasn’t expecting it to be the first in a series, but as I started coming closer and closer to the end, I realized that it may well be part of a series – and I was right, it is. The book takes you on a journey of what happens in a medieval style world when someone comes home from war and realizes that a new war is brewing and it’s starting in his own city. The book is rather slow to start and at times doesn’t make sense, but anything that doesn’t make sense at the time will be clarified later in the book.

This particular novel is written memoir style – the narrator refers to his having written things which is an interesting concept. Usually you don’t see novels written as memoirs with the narrator stating that he or she had written something earlier. I fully expect that if this series were to become movies, that you’d find an old, wizened man at the end closing a notebook in which he’d written the entire sordid tale.

The book was well written and I have to admit, although it isn’t normally my type of book, I was into it. The characters were developed as much as they needed to be and the ones that aren’t, well, there’s a reason for it. Some of them don’t need it, some of them don’t need it right now. Read the book and you’ll see.