Priest of Crowns by Peter McLean
(Jo Fletcher Books, 2022)
Reviewed by John Dodd
Medieval Peaky Blinders, that’s how I reviewed the first book. Peter Mclean could have written the same book twice more and I’d have been happy with it. Except he didn’t, Priest of Lies built on the premise, got us more involved, and Priest of Gallows brought it even higher, so it seems incomprehensible that Priest of Crowns could improve on it again.
And yet…
Somehow it does…
Tomas Piety is now a Queen’s man, above the law himself but required to enforce the will of his superiors to others. Gone is the father that was, the straight talker who looked only for his people and would do anything for them. Now he’s a man forced to deal in the duplicity of people who’ve spent their lives dealing in it and finding himself not liking being out of familiar arenas.
As with the books before, McLean keeps the action up, even though there is far more political intrigue than in previous books, never once do you feel that the words are just marking time till the action starts. It’s good to see that Piety hasn’t been made a master of all things, it’s clear that he’s not only outclassed but hopelessly outgunned in certain arenas, and he has to fall back on the things that he knows best in order to make the difference he needs to make. The plotting between factions is now endemic, no one can be trusted, even if you’ve known them forever, sometimes, particularly because you’ve known them forever.
What makes this sublime is that the machinations have now transcended the level of stabbing someone who needs stabbing, arranging an accident here, a diversion there. These are now at the level of John Le Carre, where statecraft is a thing, and you have to think not just a fight in advance, but the whole damn war. Every reveal that comes in, you know you’ve seen the build up to it, you know that you could have seen that coming if you weren’t caught up in the book, but you are caught up, and so when the truth is seen, it’s often a surprise and that’s a delight.
The violence is still there, the politics, now at the level of kings and queens, the camaraderie between soldiers and the aloof uncaring nature of power, and of course the language. May we never forget the language. I’m not just talking about the swearing (although thankfully that’s still in there), as an author, I know how much time it takes to make words count, so to have a book filled with dialogue that is short and sharp, and cuts without Mercy or Remorse is a joyful thing. The characters are still every bit as riveting as they always were, and there’s a real sense of loss whenever one of them passes. There are a number of what can only be described as good deaths, where the character goes out in such a way that you’ll remember that scene for years to come, and it's a testament to the books that have gone before that the characters within still come forwards as real people, it would have been easy to make them caricature, much as Peaky Blinders did with several of theirs, but McLean resists the temptation (unlike many of his characters) and the book is so much better for it.
When finishing any story, it’s important to tie up all the loose ends, to weave them into a complete knot, and give the reader the peace that they know that it’s over. Well, there’s no doubt that it’s over, and the ending to one of the bloodiest, most thrilling set of books that I’ve read was everything that I’d come to expect from McLean.
I can’t recommend this enough, it’s everything the previous books brought us to expect and more, the only negative I could find, was that it ended.
Or did it…?
Review from BSFA Review 19 - Download your copy here.