Lightfall by Ed Crocker – Review

Published: January 14, 2025

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

Series: The Everlands Trilogy #1

Genre: Fantasy

Pages: 384 (Hardcover)

My Rating: 4.5 Stars

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Synopsis:
An epic fantasy of vampires, werewolves and sorcerers, Lightfall is the debut novel of Ed Crocker, for fans of Jay Kristoff’s Empire of the Vampire and Richard Swan’s The Justice of Kings.

No humans here. Just immortals: their politics, their feuds—and their long buried secrets.

For centuries, vampires freely roamed the land until the Grays came out of nowhere, wiping out half the population in a night. The survivors fled to the last vampire city of First Light, where the rules are simple. If you’re poor, you drink weak blood. If you’re nobility, you get the good stuff. And you can never, ever leave.

Palace maid Sam has had enough of these rules, and she’s definitely had enough of cleaning the bedpans of the lords who enforce them. When the son of the city’s ruler is murdered and she finds the only clue to his death, she seizes the chance to blackmail her way into a better class and better blood. She falls in with the Leeches, a group of rebel maids who rein in the worst of the Lords. Soon she’s in league with a sorcerer whose deductive skills make up for his lack of magic, a deadly werewolf assassin and a countess who knows a city’s worth of secrets.

There’s just one problem. What began as a murder investigation has uncovered a vast conspiracy by the ruling elite, and now Sam must find the truth before she becomes another victim. If she can avoid getting murdered, she might just live forever.

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I couldn’t resist this because it was compared to Richard Swan’s The Justice of Kings, which is the first book in one of my favorite fantasy series. The synopsis in general was pretty irresistible. I mean, it’s set in a world with no humans, only vampires, werewolves, and sorcerers and there are rebel groups, a murder mystery, and vampire politics! It’s a fantasy burrito with all my favorite fillings.

Lightfall follows several different POV characters that we are slowly introduced to over the first little bit of the book. Actually, it’s a surprising number of POV characters (at least six), though the main group consists of Sam, a Worn vampire housemaid in service to the lord of First Light, Sage Bailey, a magickless sorcerer who journeys with a compatriot to First Light to investigate a murder, and Raven Ansbach, a former werewolf assassin who now hunts down the criminals of her own kind. The characters are slowly drawn together when the youngest son of the Lord Azzuri is murdered outside of the city by Grays, a mysterious group that drove the immortals out of their city at the center of the continent decades ago. There are so many unanswered questions – why was the young noble outside the city? What was he doing spending time with the common vampires? What could the mysterious note in his room mean?

This was a story that had me hooked almost right away thanks to the likable and varied characters. Sam in particular was a good starting point – this maid is sneaking about in the hidden sections of the library with her stolen vial of wolf blood to unlock secret doors. It made me immediately curious about both her and her motives for getting this forbidden knowledge. Sage Bailey and his fellow Quantas mage, Jacob give almost a Sherlock and Watson vibe with how they operate. Sage is obviously brilliant and it’s less obvious how Jacob is helpful, though it becomes apparent that he’s the more social of the pair and doesn’t mind doing some investigation in a bar. The two are lead members of a sorcerer cult called the Cult of Humanis and they believe the humans are still around and they also search out human relics. Raven is… brutal. The first few POV chapters of her follow her as she hunts down rogue wolves and tears them to shreds, definitely making her seem more beast than anything. The other POVs are equally interesting, though pop up less than these three – we have Alanna and Lady Hocquard (rebels) and Lord Azzuri, all of which give the reader insight into spaces that would be sorely missed without them.

Lightfall was fabulously entertaining and I think the comparison to The Justice of Kings was apt, with the investigative element and the overarching political nature of the plot. I don’t think it’s all that similar to Jay Kristoff’s writing, which this was also comp’d to as his writing (especially in Empire of the Vampire) is mostly just violent and overly packed with crass humor. If you want somewhat of a different take on the classic vampires and werewolves, with sorcerers thrown in for added fun, definitely check out Lightfall. I will be keeping my eye out for news of the sequel especially after that absolutely jaw-dropping conclusion, which went in a direction I entirely did not expect.