Sebastien de Castiel is one of my favourite authors. His Greatcoats series was a fantastic example of gritty fantasy, featuring Falcio val Mond as a man trying to be good and uphold the law in a world that wants nothing more than to crush him and all he holds dear. The Spellslinger series was equally enjoyable and I couldn’t wait to see what he came up with next.

Which turned out to be a bit of a mix of the two, with the gunslinger aspect of Spellslinger being combined with a main character that is very similar to Falcio.

Cade Ombra is a mercenary wonderist, a magic user that is paid to bring death and terror to whoever paying him is angry at. After the unexpected termination of his prior contract he need to gather a group of fellow wonderists and go fight the seven deadliest mages on the continent.

Just like The Magnificent Seven, the story is not just about going to a place and kicking teeth in. It’s about gathering a crew of very different characters, learning about them and watching all the explosive personalities sparking at each other. Which is what the majority of this novel is. And it’s a lot of fun to read. However, unlike his previous books, it’s not flashy. They were full of last stands, heroic speeches and succeeding despite the odds, because it was the right thing to do, no matter how you felt about it.

But, no matter how flashy they were, I felt that they were also built on an unsteady foundation. Traitor’s Blade is great but a bunch of stuff happens in there that don’t really make sense when thought about later. The Malevolent Seven is a foundation that’s solid as a rock and I can’t wait to see what’s being built upon it.

The magic system for this book is also more logical than in the Greatcoats series. There magic was an esoteric thing, where things just kind of happened. Here there’s logical rules. Wonderists are those who can connect with a different plane of reality and bring them to influence the world for a bit. So a thunder mage can cast lightning, etc. It reminds me a bit of Will Wight’s Traveller’s Gate series and is a nice, solid, workable system.

In fact that seems to be the best word to describe this book. It’s solid, it’s characters are solid and it’s still a lot of fun to read.