Red Tide

Marc Turner stepped into the fantasy genre in 2015 with his first book, When the Heavens Fall, which was a good combination of high fantasy and grimdark. His second release, Dragon Hunters was set in the same world, but with a standalone story and new cast of characters. Red Tide, the third book in The Chronicle of the Exile, brings both strands together in a fantastically grimdark story that easily tops both preceding books. It could be read as a standalone, but you'd get a lot more out of it having read the first two.Marc Turner handles a large cast of characters with skill that makes me green with envy. His multiple POV characters are a rotten collection of assassins, pirates, broken warriors, and cursed nobles, and each of them feels as fleshed-out as if they had a whole novel dedicated to them. The characterization is as morally gray as you could want, and there are plenty of shocking subversions of fantasy tropes. His world is filled with magic and mystery, with gods playing around with the lives of mortals. It's pretty much just a flawless book, and the series, if it gets big enough, could genuinely begin to rival Malazan, and at the intense rate Turner is churning these bad-boys out, it might not take long. The man is a machine.Read this book if you like sweeping high-fantasy with a very grimdark twist, or want to read a book that's almost perfect (and if you don't, what's wrong with you?).