I just finished reading Sworn to the Night, book one of Craig Schaefer’s Wisdom’s Grave trilogy.

This trilogy is the big crossover event for…pretty much everything Schaefer’s written prior to this, actually. Daniel Faust and Harmony Black show up, obviously, since the trilogy is a continuation of their respective urban fantasy series, but the main leads are two characters from his Revanche Cycle, reincarnated across worlds as part of a perpetually-repeating story that keeps forcing them into the same roles, again and again. This time they’re a NYPD cop and a college professor who dabbles in magic on the side. Ranged against them are the full forces of the Enemy from the first story ever told, the Courts of Hell, and the nihilistic interdimensional criminal Network.

It ends, as it always must, in blood.

This book is great. You really shouldn’t read it unless you’ve read the Harmony Black and Daniel Faust books as well, because a lot of the stuff that’s paying off here was set up in those series, but if you’ve done the reading then this is nothing but a delight. Sworn to the Night, as the first book in the series, spends 90% of its page count on these two new/old characters, Marie and Nessa, as they’re slowly inducted into the fucked-up world that Schaefer has built up in the Faust and Black books, and it’s fantastic. We get an entire book of these two characters being introduced to conspiracies and enemies that carry more weight than you’d expect because we have so much background context for them. A murder cult is introduced, serving the King of Wolves–we know who that is, we’ve got all the background we need, so we can just hit the ground running and get straight to the good part.

Schaefer’s urban fantasy is always wonderful pulp action nonsense, and this is it’s epitome. I didn’t read it when it first came out because I thought it was about new characters who I wasn’t interested in, and honestly I’m happy that I put it off because now I don’t need to wait to jump into the next book. I expect I’ll have it finished extremely quickly.