Meanwhile, Tamas is busy with purging the country's nobility and struggling to maintain peace during the inevitable civil war. Taniel Two-Shot, famed Powder Mage marksman, hunter, and killer of Privileged has come home to see his father. And even though I thought I didn’t like flintlock fantasy, it’s happened again with Brian McClellan‘s Promise of Blood.

This premise screams off the page and the mix of gunpowder, muskets and magic didn’t initially pique my appetite; thankfully I was wrong (it's surprising how often that happens). Here, evil takes the shape of fire-breathing dragons—beasts that feed off chaos and imbalance—set on destroying humankind. To close this off, the reason behind me reading this first trilogy of Brian’s is to celebrate the release of Wrath of Empire, Sins of Empire’s follow-up and the second book of his sequel trilogy in the Powder Mage world. Both male and female privileged have them but it’s only mentioned there are male harems, never shown. Taniel, Borbador and Ka-Poel fight it off with difficulty, Ka-Poel's abilities as a Bone-eye sorcerer giving them an edge.Yet his actions have far-reaching consequences of which no reasonable man could have conceived, and the king will prove the easiest obstacle to overcome in his quest to free Adro. Most of my questions were answered and I didn’t feel like anything was missing once I finished the book.

Brian McClellan's PROMISE OF BLOOD, a debut trilogy set in a world inspired by the revolutionary turmoil of 18th-century Europe complete with guillotines, starving peasants, fanatical royalists and a hero whose survival depends on a small group of honorable mages, including his own estranged son, to Devi Pillai at Orbit , in a good deal, in a three-book deal, for publication in Summer 2013, by Caitlin Blasdell at Liza Dawson Associates (World English). This can be considered the one weak link in an otherwise good plot and it did lead to a nice fight scene at the end of the story.

A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children. And that’s just the start of Promise of Blood, one of the flagship titles of everything flintlock fantasy is supposed to be. It consists of the novels Promise of Blood (2013), The Crimson Campaign (2014) and The Autumn Republic (2015).

The Predeii were thought to have been wiped out during the Bleakening, a world war among all nine kingdoms. Stretched to his limit, Tamas is relying heavily on his few remaining powder mages, including the embittered Taniel, a brilliant marksman who also happens to be his estranged son, and Adamat, a retired police inspector whose loyalty is being tested by blackmail.Following these events, Tamas gives Taniel another mission: to find and kill Privileged Borbador to prevent him from completing the curse.