Set in a densely detailed fantasy city, Gareth Hanrahan's debut novel, The Gutter Prayer, pits thieves and saints against gods and monsters in an epic battle of both might and wits.
In the ancient city of Guerdon, built upon layer after layer of its own past, three thieves fall headfirst into an ancient war. Carillon Thay, who just wants to get out of the city, finds her life upended when she begins having hyper-realistic visions of a long-buried evil. Her friend Spar from the Brotherhood of Thieves struggles to maintain his humanity in the face of a disease that kills through slow calcification. Rounding out the group is Rat, a ghoul who feeds on corpses like the rest of his kind but chooses to live among humans rather than in the ghoul tunnels far below the streets. Following a burglary gone awry, the trio incurs the wrath of Thieves and thief-takers, but they have even bigger problems. Cari's visions mark her as a saint, but the gods who claim her have an agenda that will bathe Guerdon in blood unless she and her friends can stop them.
Hanrahan digs into fantasy tropes with relish but creates the scares himself, including the eerie Tallowmen, living humans molded into wax monstrosities. Snappy banter and surprise touches like a foul-mouthed, aging warrior saint and a secret subway run by worm monsters add buoyancy to a world of hungry gods and opportunistic humans. Genre fans will love this dark fantasy with Discworld-style sensibilities, the first in a projected series. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads