Grave Empire
Ratings6
Average rating4.6
A new age of exploration and innovation has dawned, and the Empire of the Wolf stands to take its place as the foremost power in the known world. Glory and riches await.
But dark days are coming. A mysterious plague has broken out in the pagan kingdoms to the north, while in the south, the Empire’s proxy war in the lands of the wolfmen is weeks away from total collapse.
Worse still is the message brought to the Empress by two heretic monks, who claim to have lost contact with the spirits of the afterlife. The monks believe this is the start of an ancient prophecy heralding the end of days—the Great Silence.
It falls to Renata Rainer, a low-ranking ambassador to an enigmatic and vicious race of mermen, to seek answers from those who still practice the arcane arts. But with the road south beset by war and the Empire on the brink of supernatural catastrophe, soon there may not be a world left to save…
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Series
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1 primary book#1 in The Great Silence
The Great Silence is a 1-book series first released in 2025 with contributions by Richard Swan.
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This book absolutely slapped. The world is greatly expanded from the first trilogy and the fantasy + horror combo is present throughout the book. Plus mermen that have armor clad shark companions I mean come on that’s awesome!
For me this was fine. It had some good moments, but it felt more of an atmospheric work as opposed to a more story or character based novel. This is not a bad thing if that is what you look for or want in a novel, but it just did not work well for me.
I also did not get along with any of the characters. I am not a "character focused" reader, but two of the main characters were kind of milk-toast, and the third turned on a dime from an interesting flawed character with dubious motives to mustache twirling villain in a short time span.
The storyline with the mer-men I felt too long to get going. It felt like "and then" travel blogging for over half the novel to get to the crux of the story line. The most interesting story line was in the far east, but I felt we were given the least amount of pages dedicated to that story line and then removed the POV character from the region at the end of the novel.
Will I continue? I dunno at the moment. The novel started out at 4 stars and then for the majority of the middle it was solidly in the 2.5-3 star range with the ending showing some more promise, but continuing some of the issues I had in the middle. I'll have to let this marinate for a while to see if I would be interested in continuing the series.
