Grave Empire by Richard Swan – Review

Published: February 4, 2025

Publisher: Orbit Books

Series: The Great Silence #1

Genre: Fantasy

Pages: 545 (Kindle)

My Rating: 4.5 Stars

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

Synopsis:
Blood once turned the wheels of empire. Now it is money.

A new age of exploration and innovation has dawned, and the Empire of the Wolf stands to take its place as the foremost power in the known world. Glory and riches await.

But dark days are coming. A mysterious plague has broken out in the pagan kingdoms to the north, while in the south, the Empire’s proxy war in the lands of the wolfmen is weeks away from total collapse.

Worse still is the message brought to the Empress by two heretic monks, who claim to have lost contact with the spirits of the afterlife. The monks believe this is the start of an ancient prophecy heralding the end of days-the Great Silence.

It falls to Renata Rainer, a low-ranking ambassador to an enigmatic and vicious race of mermen, to seek answers from those who still practice the arcane arts. But with the road south beset by war and the Empire on the brink of supernatural catastrophe, soon there may not be a world left to save . . .

Grave Empire is the first novel in an unmissable new epic fantasy series from Sunday Times bestseling author Rich Swan, packed full of action, intrigue and adventure

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Since finishing the Empire of the Wolf trilogy last year, I’ve been eagerly awaiting Swan’s next work to see if it could possibly match what ended up being my favorite new trilogy in recent years. Grave Empire, the first installment in The Great Silence trilogy, is set approximately two centuries (from what I gathered) after the events of the Empire of the Wolf and the Sovan empire is an entirely new beast. This is the dual-headed beast of capitalism and colonialism in a more modern age and the now dwindled empire also has a brand new set of supernatural problems to face.

Grave Empire is a multi-POV story following Renata Rainier, an ambassador to the Stygion mer-men, Peter Kleist, a young lieutenant traveling to his new posting at a border fort, and Lamprecht von Oldenburg, a nobleman with an unhealthy interest in the arcane. Each character, though separated by many hundreds of miles, comes to know of a terrible occurrence in the otherworld known only as the Great Silence. The two monks traveling with Renata know only that they can no longer hear anything from the entities they deal with on the other side. Peter and a group of soldiers are sent on a mission to find out the source of the haunting screams at night and the grisly deaths of soldiers. Von Oldenburg is investigating the source of a plague in the Draedist lands to the north and in doing so discovers something entirely horrifying. 

This book is a fine set up for what I expect will be an excellent series. It balances the build up of this brand new world with the mystery of the supernatural horrors occurring behind the scenes and those are two things I very much love. The on-page supernatural bits were excellent, though they didn’t fill me with quite as much dread as those in the first series. Or, I should say it was a different kind of dread that I think will become more present as the series progresses. I also love the characters – Renata and Peter are both likable in their own way and are doing their best in difficult situations and von Oldenburg goes from unlikable rich guy to an absolute bastard of a villain by the end of the book.  

Grave Empire was an excellent opener to Richard Swan’s new flintlock fantasy trilogy and will be perfect for fans of Abercrombie’s Age of Madness trilogy, Brian McClellan’s Powder Mage series, and Tchaikovsky’s Guns of the Dawn. While this has somewhat less of a focus on the militaristic angle, it’s still very present and the grinding wheels of empire will definitely crush all beneath them in the name of progress. This can be read without having read the Empire of the Wolf trilogy first as it doesn’t spoil anything and you’ll only be missing out on the minor joy of recognizing a few names that get referenced. I can’t wait for the next installment and I have my fingers crossed that things will get dark and creepy!