Thank you to Orbit and Josiah Bancroft for the ARC in exchange for an honest review. I'll have a full video review closer to the release date. I highly recommend this and can't wait for more people to read it. I know that doesn't make any sense, but I don't think there's anything like the feeling of wonder when reading a Bancroft novel. This book at time felt like Up, The Phantom Tollbooth, Mary Poppins, Agatha Christie, and the Bourne Identity. There are some characters I was not sad to see go and some that I'm slavering to see again. I was genuinely sad when it ended, as several things had not been wrapped up, despite the story itself being self-contained in nature. I think if you didn't like Senlin for some reason, you should still give this book a chance, as it is likely whatever your complaint was was resolved here. I think there is something for everyone to like, no matter what you liked about Senlin. There's also a very clear message about the responsibility of the nobility to care for, not neglect, the plebiean.Īll in all, I think THE HEXOLOGISTS takes the best elements of the Books of Babel and combines them.

There's a great cast of characters both grounded and bizarre. I loved exploring the Victorianesque world and the magic, creatures, spells, and relics. The mystery is really fun and twisty-turny. Our protagonists-a very happily married couple-are relatable and complex.

Bancroft's writing is at his best here, a perfect blend of 10 dollar words and yeoman's prose. Their effort to expose a royal secret buried under forty years of lies brings them nose to nose with a violent antiroyalist gang, avaricious ghouls, alchemists who draw their power from a hell-like dimension, and a bookish dragon who only occasionally eats people.Īrmed with a love toughened by adversity and a stick of chalk that can conjure light from the darkness, hope from the hopeless, Iz and Warren Wilby are ready for whatever springs from the alleys, graves, and shadows next.Ī really, really delightful read. Well-acquainted with the weird, they never shy away from a challenging case.īut when they are approached by the royal secretary and told the king pleads to be baked into a cake-going so far as to wedge himself inside a lit oven-the Wilbies soon find themselves embroiled in a mystery that could very well see the nation turned on its head. Aided by hexes and a bag of charmed relics, the Wilbies have recovered children abducted by chimney-wraiths, removed infestations of barb-nosed incubi, and ventured into the Gray Plains of the Unmade to soothe a troubled ghost. The Hexologists, Iz and Warren Wilby, are quite accustomed to helping desperate clients with the bugbears of city life. The first book in a wildly entertaining new fantasy series from acclaimed author Josiah Bancroft where a married couple team up to solve magical, and often quite odd, mysteries.

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