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This is what I'm reading right now. I've just finished the second book in the series, and it's a fun read. It follows three PoV characters: the field marshal who has just succeeded in a bloody coup against his own king, the police inspector searching for a traitor in the republic's fledgling government, and the maverick war hero who wanders around with a savage sorceress companion. Unusually for books with multiple PoVs, I was invested in all three storylines. Any one of them alone could have made a plot worth telling, and together they complemented each other and added background flavour perfectly.

The background characters are fairly vivid and fantastic as well - we have gems like the chef hanging around claiming to be a god and a next-level pimp of a priest. They draw the main characters into some excellent conflict with high stakes, and the action flows with decent regularity.

I'd probably say this is among the top ten new fantasy novels which has been published in the last five years.

 

I read the first book a year or two ago and while a mate of mine is really digging it, I couldn't get into this at all. The characters were uninteresting for the most part and it didn't really suck me into the setting at all. The magic and bullet stuff was kinda neat but it lacked anything emotionally meaningful or even any and all cool scenes. It wasn't funny, it wasn't interesting, it wasn't exciting and it plainly didn't make me care about any of it to ever check out book 2 or even think about it unless someone else mentioned it.

Like, I can barely remember anything of it and that's not really a good sign. I really only remember the maverick war hero and his savage sorceress and even that only a bit. Maybe it is unfair to judge it on the standards of things like Practical Guide to Evil or Wandering Inn or even Gods are Bastards but it simply lacks the quality, heart and guts of those kind of stories. Seemed too much like a paint by numbers generic fantasy novel to me.

Kinda surprised for your level of praise, tbh, but maybe it's just another case of the story not working for me personally, but yeah. Maybe book 2 and 3 get better but book 1 was rather meh.

 

Fair for the most part, but I did think

Spoiler

Shooting God in the face with a flintlock rifle from a distance of six miles while high from railing gunpowder

was a pretty cool way to end the first book.

 

I finished this series and it was a favorite of mine. More of a fun read than anything that makes you think deeply or has some huge message. Just lots of cool scenes like the aforementioned god getting shot in the face. The later books do start to drag though and there are some sequences that rush by when they should have been expanded. Overall it's a 4/5 though because of all the fun. Great time waster or weekend read if you're looking for something light.

 

I read the first book a while back, and part of the second book before I put this down. As others here have said, I found it to be very shallow. There was little emotional engagement or complexity. Just not my cup of tea. Like Nemrut, I remember nothing of it, apart from some very basic details.