Book: Mortedant’s Peril
Author: RJ Barker
Publisher: Tor Books
Year: 2026
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “In a city of ancient automata, strange spirits, and sleeping gods, a cleric of death is about to find his own life on the line…unless he can find his apprentice’s killer first. This thrilling fantasy murder mystery is the first in a perilous new series from the acclaimed author of The Bone Ships and Age of Assassins.”

Review : Mortedant’s Peril is a winding, twisting, murder mystery wrapped in a fantasy novel set in a strange world filled with blood magic, old gods, and strange lands across the sea. It follows a Mortedant, that is, a death worker whose job is to read the final thoughts of those who have passed, named Irody Hasp as he embarks on a quest to not only seek out his apprentice’s killer but to take vengeance on those who may have, in fact, killed his apprentice on accident while attempting to kill Hasp himself. Hasp embarks on the journey with the help of his apprentice’s young sister, Mirial, and his assigned bodyguard, Whisper, a sea person warrior with potentially royal family ties. What follows is a classic murder mystery with winding back roads, secret passageways, poison berries, death cults, and magical beings who seemingly control the city and, indeed, seem to control Hasp’s own fate.

Mortedant’s Peril gets off to a slow, so very slow, start. It was difficult for me to find my way into the world of Elbay, the city Hasp resides within, and even more difficult for me to wrap my head around all the different creatures, spirit forms, and even the way people are addressed within the world. It didn’t feel like a smooth dive into a new world and the world building felt a bit stunted. There were several instances where I found myself reading and rereading passages, trying to make sense of Barker’s descriptors, often times leaving things without an image in my mind. There’s a sweet spot with fantasy novels where the reader doesn’t have to work too hard to imagine what’s being introduced and this book missed the mark a bit in that regard. However, while a slow start, once I got into the meat of the novel, I found it hard to put down. If you can make it through the first hundred pages or so, you’ll be well into an enjoyable mystery.

While a fantasy first, this book is at it’s heart a mystery so I do want to tell you that I was able to solve the mystery – though, not the mechanics – long before the book reached it’s zenith. On top of that, Barker introduces the reader to so many different religious sects, cults, and names I found difficult to connect to, that the mechanics of how the murder took place and who exactly was involved felt hard for me to piece together in the end. It didn’t keep me from enjoying the reveal, but it did take something away from the experience.

I struggled a bit with the broader picture of what this book was ultimately about. At first, I believed this was a fantasy novel written to reveal to the reader the dangers of racism and an us vs them perspective, as Hasp, and truly so many people in this book, relies heavily on what I could only call racism (though, in this fantasy world we’re talking about the distinction between people of land vs people of sea, rather than people of differing skin colors) and it’s that very racism that made me recoil at the first bit of the book. The use of “it” as a pronoun is difficult to stomach, to say the least. But the anti-racist plotline doesn’t really pan out beyond Hasp’s subtle move from using “it” to “she” when referring to Whisper, though notably, not when he refers to other creatures. There’s also a strange “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument made toward the end of the book that didn’t sit well with me, either.

All in all, I enjoyed the overall plot of Mortedant’s Peril, I was able to figure out the mystery before the end of the book, and there are several questionable themes throughout the book that don’t resolve in a way that feels good. I found myself returning to the book over and over again to turn the pages and see how things would play out, so this was better than it wasn’t, but it was still not my favorite nor was it a truly successful fantasy book.

Advice : If you love fantasy, or dark and dystopian worlds, if you don’t mind doing extra work where world building lacks, and like the idea of a mystery fantasy novel, this will be a great read for you! If you don’t want to do the work, you might skip this one or check it out from your local library rather than buying it outright.