From the Riley Locke desk
Bones, swords, and one extremely reluctant cavalier, and Muir's 2019 debut announced itself with a marketing line about lesbian necromancers in space that undersold how much rigour was hiding under the sunglasses. The desk states its filing up front, on the record per the charter. This book shelves on the SF side of the border. The necromancy is a technology, with rules, costs, energy sources, and research programmes, run inside a spacefaring empire ten thousand years old, and The Second Moon may dispute custody when it opens. The desk will defend the filing.
The premise, audited: what if sainthood in a haunted space empire had entrance exams, and the candidates started dying? Gideon Nav has spent eighteen years trying to escape the Ninth House, a dying cult of bones at the empire's edge, and is press-ganged into serving as cavalier to the person she hates most alive, its necromancer heiress Harrowhark. The Emperor has summoned heirs of the nine houses to Canaan House, a rotting palace, to attempt the trials of Lyctorhood, immortal sainthood, method undisclosed. Then the murders begin, and the book reveals itself as a locked-room mystery wearing gothic armour, solvable, fairly clued, and paced like a duel. The supporting houses are drawn fast and deep, teen twins, a devoted paladin pair, scientists of death with laboratory hierarchies, and the desk kept a suspect chart that the book honoured.
What the desk admires is the magic system audited as science. Thanergy and thalergy behave like conserved quantities, the trials are laboratory challenges with repeatable methods, and the necromancers talk shop like postdocs, which is the joke and the worldbuilding at once. Skeletons here are infrastructure, labour, and munition, and the empire's economy runs on the dead the way ours runs on oil. Gideon's narration, profane, pining, allergic to reverence, runs against the gothic grain and generates the friction the book runs on. The trials' true mechanism, what Lyctorhood actually costs, everything concerning Dulcinea, and the ending, Gideon's act above all, sit sealed at the registry's full strength, and the desk will add only that the last fifty pages convert comedy into something else without dropping a single held note.
Verdict on the premise's bill. Paid, at a price the title of the sequel confirms.
Honest notices: gore as decor and as event, body horror, a closed-room body count, grief with delayed detonation, and a first hundred pages that withhold explanations on purpose. Meme fluency optional, patience required, both repaid.
Who is this for? Mystery readers who want their clues anatomical, SF readers who claim fantasy never shows its equations, and anyone who reads for voice first. One warning, issued kindly. The desk was not warned, and has not recovered.