Priest

You wants you some hard-boiled fantasy? You gotch'a some with Colville's powerfully terse Priest.Shorty, terse dialog; characters who are hard with sharp angles, laconic prose without anything extra, and a mystery that needs some solving. I highly recommend Mathew Colville's Priest as a stand out hard-boiled mystery fantasy novel. Fantasy and hard-boiled mystery, outside of the urban fantasy meets detective fiction (i.e. The Dresden Files), is an unusual pairing. But Colville combines them here in Priest.And it's combination that works very well indeed in the story -- the mystery pulls you forward through the novel till the last page. The plot is strong with a complex mystery that keeps pulling you forward, the characters are strong without being black and white cut outs, and even better, it's a self-contained adventure, not some heroic saga that will span 14 books before spitting out a cheap and unsatisfying ending. Priest not a perfect novel and there are flaws: once you get into the story you'll see very quickly that it is indeed a self published book; the novel needs some serious editing with a good deal of typos & grammatical errors that liter the pages. But if you put aside your copy-editor cloak for a bit, you'll see it's still a pretty good book all things considering.Note that Priest scored the 9th spot on the list of 10 in Lawrence's Self Pub Blog Off competition last year.So for a flawed yet still very readable book, give Priest a read. I feel it stands out as a strong example of indie fantasy that really is a cut above most of the self pub stuff out there.