There are plenty of different pockets of fantasy fandom these days, and while I’m not sure I fit neatly into any one in particular—in part by design—I tend to spend more time reading the trimmer books popular among the Hugo-voting crowd than I do on contemporary epic fantasy. And so despite all the hype for Richard Swan’s debut novel, The Justice of Kings, it was two years old by the time I circled back to see what all the fuss was about.
The Justice of Kings takes place in a secondary world with much of the continent on which it is set having been conquered by an empire that has brought ideals of equal justice for all along with the war and devastation of conquest. The narrator is an orphan from a small, Germanic-inspired backwater who finds herself apprenticed to a traveling representative of the Emperor who variously serves as investigator and as judge. But a murder in a wealthy merchant town sends her master on an investigation that runs deep into sectarian conflict that could shake the very foundations of the empire.
My immediate assumption when reading European-inspired epic fantasy is that it will require a whole lot of reading time. That’s not always a bad thing—there’s a reason my blog name is a Wheel of Time-based pun—but the longer the TBR gets, the harder it is to set aside months on a single series. But The Justice of Kings subverts that expectation. It does open a trilogy, but it does so with a fast-paced book short of 500 pages that has enough of its own plot to feel like a satisfying novel and not just a promissory note for a series. And while it may take a few chapters for the first body to drop, it spends relatively little of those opening chapters on mere scene-setting, instead consistently providing the leads with compelling challenges that draws the reader’s attention.
Once the mystery element enters the story, it’s remarkably easy to binge. The reader may have pretty good ideas about the identity of some of the villains, but the shape of the plot and the severity of the fallout are big questions that keep the reader engaged and the pages turning. This simply isn’t the sort of book that demands the long haul commitment that one may expect from epic fantasy.
And not only is it an easy read, it’s a pretty good one. I’ve mentioned the pacing being excellent and the plot engaging, but it also offers plenty of glimpses into a fascinating wider world. There’s some intense and poorly understood death magic and plenty of political machinations just beginning to surface. The narrator doesn’t necessarily have the deepest characterization in the world, but she’s plenty sympathetic, and her role in chronicling her master’s actions is just as important as her own role in the story. This isn’t quite a Holmes and Watson situation where the narrator is a secondary figure next to the story’s true star, but there are hints in that direction—the Emperor’s Justice is the most dynamic character on offer here.
Overall, this is an engaging story that reads faster than its length suggests. It’s well-paced and well-plotted, and if the characterization isn’t the highlight, there’s still dynamism in the character aspect. What’s more, it does exactly what you want from the opener to a fantasy series: tells its own story while simultaneously opening the door to a plot that will stretch across several books.
Recommended if you like: epic fantasy, fantasy mystery.
Can I use it for Bingo? It’s First in a Series, Features Dreams, has a Prologue or Epilogue, includes Reference Materials, and is a Book Club pick.
Overall rating: 16 of Tar Vol’s 20. Four stars on Goodreads.