Absolutely Loved This!

I've had mixed feelings about the included Audible goodies, but this is an absolutely phenomenal fantasy tale of necromancy and intrigue that has shades of The Locked Tomb series with a slightly more serious tone and somewhat more traditional fantasy setting.

I heartily recommend it to anyone who enjoyed Gideon the Nineth or who simply enjoy good grim fantasy.

The narrators are phenomenal.

I genuinely can't say enough good about this book and can't wait to check out the rest of the trilogy and the rest of the author's work!

CW: Torture, Slavery (Ghosts), Confinement in small, locked spaces ( )

I got an ARC copy from the author, thanks!

Now, Grimdark is not my forte and I only read it on occasion. I see more than enough death and misery in my line of work to feel like I would enjoy it. That said, despite the fact that Chasing Graves is essentially a book about unscrupulous people murdering pretty much everyone they can in order to turn them into enslaved ghosts and sell them off like cattle for eternity, this book was still very enjoyable to read.

And yes, pretty much everyone is a villain in the book.

Caltro never wanted to work in Araxas because it's a really dangerous place, but poverty enticed him to heed to a strange papyrus placed on the doorstep to his home one day, and behold! He wasn't in the city for more than a few minutes before a gang of soulsnatchers murdered him and ultimately sold to a wealthy noblewoman named Horix. He has decided to use scheming along with a hopeless dream of idealism to regain his freedom as a free ghost.

A second story erupts at the same time. A strange middle aged woman with dark hair and green eyes has spent a huge effort in locating her estranged husband, murdered him, and is now on a long journey back to Araxas to claim his soul and all of his earthly belongings as her own. Time is running out. She has 40 days between his death to place his festering corpse in the magical Nyxwater or else, his scheming ghost will vanish into nothing. If crossing the desert without a steed and a very, very angry recently murdered husband didn't make the voyage bad enough, she has to fight tooth and nail against countless bandits who would love nothing more than to steal the ghost and sell him off. It's a race against time with everything going against her.

Ben has a really lofty imagination, and the worldbuilding is suberb. I shudder at the wholly twisted hellhole of the afterlife of the novel, and yet, it explains a lot of Caltro's motive to break free of his forced indenturement. We feel the world through the eyes of a freshly created ghost, and the sorrows he feels about his beer gut, inability to properly sleep, or eat food.

The villains are scheming, and the politics and backstabbing is probably one of the highest markers of the book. I love political stories which is offered handsomely in this book. If there was only one thing that did feel a bit of a letdown, it was the slightly anticlimatic ending. This is obviously a book that will force you to read the upcoming sequel to find out what happens next. Therefore, if you are a person who likes books being 100% nicely wrapped up, you might have to search elsewhere.

I didn't find any spelling errors, typos, or plot holes per se, but there is a paragraph long sentence early in the novel that was really clunky and hard to understand. I think it was around the 903 point in the kindle file.

While I am a bit biased against this particular book genre, my personal quips should not deter people from reading an otherwise very entertaining story filled with scum and villainry. I award this book 4 1/2 stars. ( )

Not badly written, but 1. i got really bored, 2. too often it was not believable, sometimes ridiculously so 3. at least one of the storylines (of 3) should have been cut, cause it dragged the book down. ( )

Chasing Graves
(The Chasing Graves Trilogy #1)
by Ben Galley
This is a book with a plot I just loved but felt the presentation of it was a bit brutus and rambling at certain times. I liked some characters but liked the idea of the characters in the book. I really wanted to like it more. It was an okay read.
A book about enslaving ghosts. So people would be murdered to be enslaved. ( )

4.5

Book source ~ Tour. My review is voluntary and honest.

This story starts out with a prologue where a woman is dragging a dead man through a desert. I have to say, quite intriguing. Then chapter one introduces a guy taking a shit in an old woman’s lockbox. Meet Caltro Basalt. Master locksmith extraordinaire and someone who thinks outside the box (or takes a big dump in one) when getting revenge on people. He’s received a job offer that originated from the Cloudpiercer in Araxes. His situation is desperate enough that he decides to chance going to the City of Countless Souls even though the chances of dying there are quite high. But dying there isn’t the worst part. Oh, no. Once dead, someone can claim your soul and when you come back as a ghost (known as shades in this world) they own you. Instant slave. Yeah, Araxes doesn’t appear to be a place that I’d want to visit, for any reason. But Caltro needs funds so off he goes - only to be murdered almost as soon as he sets foot off the docks. And then the book is off and running with several people on different roads set to converge. What in the Arctian Empire could dead gods, an anonymous woman, a dead and bound locksmith, the Empress-In-Waiting, and a soulstealer have in common? You’ll have to read to find out.

Told from several POVs this is one highly imaginative and deeply twisted tale. There’s Caltro’s experiences and the woman in the desert is Nilith who killed her husband Farazar, but the nuggets about them are dropped sparingly as they traverse the dangerous desert lands. The Empress-In-Waiting, Princess Sisine Talin Renala, has her own agenda as does the soulstealer , Boss Temsa. Each one goes about their business in this book, but as the pages fly by I could tell they were going to intersect at some point. Well-written and nail-biting this dark fantasy contains murder, slavery, power, and corruption in a uniquely built world. Luckily, there’s some humor thrown in to lighten it up just a tad. Two of our fellow journeymen’s stories end in a bit of a cliffhanger (and frankly a jaw dropper for one), but not such big ones that you want to toss a table. Or two. I can’t wait to see what happens in book 2, Grim Solace! ( )