Thanks to Daniel Dickinson for sending this novel to me for review. I'd picked up a couple of other books by him at the Mesa Book Festival when his booth was next to mine, but I haven't read them yet. As a submission, this one jumps up the schedule and I was happy to read it. I almost feel hard-hearted for pointing out production flaws, but they're the first thing we see after the cover, so it can't be avoided. And hey, I'm here to be honest about what I read. That includes the bad as well as the good.

The cover is excellent, even if the artwork depicts the sword very differently to the text. It's not out in the open like that, rather "camouflaged under green and brown plants and buried halfway up the blade". At least the sword is actually in the book. I've read far too many paperbacks where the cover art isn't representative at all. I can totally forgive that. However, the entire novel has double-spacing and no justification. This is, therefore, literally twice the size that it should be. And everything starts on the left hand pages, verso rather than recto. Those are all bad decisions. On the other hand, the font choice is excellent and the drop caps to begin chapters work well.

Most important of all, the actual writing is very good, with some effective descriptions and turns of phrase. The story embraces a whole bundle of tropes as if it aches to be predictable, only to do things with them that are different from the norm. The primary two characters are well-explored and, while the relationship between them is an agreeably unusual one, what shines out brightest is how the rest of the world sees them. They're gradually isolated even as they're given more and more freedom. It's a fascinating dynamic and I look forward to seeing that develop. After all, this is very much a beginning, book one in the 'Gathering Storm Saga' and there will be more.

We meet Bree first, as an apparent vagrant in Fort Pointe, a town in the land of Xonthian. She's a lot more than that, as we discover when she slays a vampire in public. She's a vampire herself but also a vampire slayer and she's been protecting Fort Pointe without the town even knowing it. As she prepares to leave, because, in a manner of speaking, her cover has been blown, she discovers that the vampire she killed was a decoy and there's another vampire there. She's left Fort Pointe open to a new threat. I'm guessing that will become important in a future book.

While Bree is one of the two leads, the main one is Tiger Darqlaw, the half-elf adopted son of an important military man, Hon'shu. We meet him soon enough, as he returns to his adopted city of Xonthian City, but gets into trouble almost immediately when he heals an innkeeper with magic. That's an entirely new thing to him, but it's a dangerous one as magic is banned in Xonthian. The war, which has been raging for a hundred years, is the Fire Isle Mages against the two kingdoms and the Clerics of GateHar. The Mages and the Clerics have magic and Xonthian doesn't want any other magic users in the land. Paladin Iro quickly hears about the innkeeper and investigates.

Hon'shu is played up as important, a soldier with the Swords of Justice who rose to the top of his profession, even becoming appointed Head Military Adviser to the king. However, he's taken out in the blink of an eye by a vampire. Tiger tries to fight him and fails miserably, but Bree has been on the vampire's trail and the boy wakes with her gone and the vampire merely ash on the floor. With his only family gone and his newfound power threatened, he hits the road and tracks down the sword from the cover, which he was apparently found next to many years before. It has some sort of magic attached because nobody else can even touch it. He can and now he's armed.

It's as he acquires this weapon that was presumably his or destined to be his that Bree shows up and the core relationship of the book can begin. Even together, this feels like Tiger's book for the longest time. We get some back story for Bree, or Sangmu, to use her sire name, but she falls into the role of sidekick rather than colleague. When he decides to train with the Swords of Justice, it leaves her outside. When he volunteers for a dangerous military mission to North Kelsa, she's left behind. When he bumps into a thieves guild called the Anarchs and the Atticatten called Yatáki, who's one of them, she's not part of the scene.

However, just as I was ready to think of this as the Tiger Darqlaw series with Bree as an occasional sidekick, things twist into shape and the two of them become the partnership I presume Dickinson always wanted them to be. The promise of that arrives late but this was always the first book in a series and I want a subsequent novel that takes these two to war. However, I also want to find out just how involved Yatáki will become in proceedings. She's an occasional supporting character this time out but she has serious promise to become more than that. I look forward to it.

Most of the worst aspects of this book tie to its layout, but there are a few within the text. Many of these scenes are sourced from tropes and not all of them escape that to tell something new. I wonder how many character names are based on places in Asia too: Hon'shu isn't the only one, as we meet Si'ann too. The apostrophes don't do much to hide Honshu and Xian. Other names can be far too connected to their owner's roles or natures. Of course, those aren't huge flaws and it isn't hard to look past them.

The best aspects tie to the writing. A lot happens in the second half of the novel and I'm not going to talk about any of it, but it kept me on the hop. Every time I recognised a trope and knew where a chapter was going, Dickinson mixed it up a little and took me somewhere else. However, I ought to return to my earlier comment about how the rest of the world views Tiger and Bree, which I'd call the greatest success that the book achieves. Many in Xonthian would like to dismiss them as, respectively, a magic user and a vampire, which is fair but far too simplistic.

Both are outcasts in a way, not merely misfits but known dangers. Tiger has good connections due to his father's prominence—he gets to talk to the king more than once. However, he doesn't end this book in the same light as he started it and neither does Bree. The king sees them differently and so do the Clerics of GateHar and Commander Jules Sworren, an old friend of his father who now leads the Swords of Justice. They're still what they were but their place in Xonthian changes multiple times and may not be set yet. Paladin Iro may be the only one who sticks to the simplistic view, however much he changes otherwise, and that's not a good thing.

'Blood Bound' is a relatively recent publication, dated December 2025, so there is no book two at this time. However, I believe at least two of Dickinson's other books, 'Gathering Tide' and 'Ember of War', contain stories set in the same world of Xonthian. The latter certainly seems to focus on other characters at other times but I know less about the former. What these books underline is just how well Dickinson knows his chosen setting. He apparently created Xonthian at ten and has been expanding it ever since. I have a feeling that we're going to see a lot more books set there and I'll happily dive into them too. ~~ Hal C F Astell