Priest of Bones has a lot of potential, and almost lives up to it. The side characters are all interesting, the action is incredibly well-paced and engaging, and it gets surprisingly dark in a completely unexpected way without feeling cheap. I will always love a story about gangs taking over towns, and while Priest of Bones didn’t do anything new it did do it very well. The problems lie in the protagonist, and in the setting. Tomas is (I think) meant to be a sympathetic sociopath, balancing ruthless pragmatism with enough redeeming qualities to keep the reader interested. Instead, he’s just flat, moving people around like chess pieces without any sort of emotional justification. Even his supposed feelings for Ailsa disappear the second it’s no longer relevant. He has agency, at least, but no compelling motivations. The setting is an extension of this flatness: Ellinsburg is never flashed out, feeling like a series of linked set pieces rather than a real setting. The wider world was basically nonexistent, which would have been fine if the the ending hadn’t explicitly been about entering the wider world. I would love to read a sequel about Anne and Jochan and the rest, but I have zero interest in

Tomas entering high society

.