Review - The Crimson Road by Angela Slatter

The Crimson Road

Angela Slatter
Titan Books, 11 February 2025
Available as: PB, 368pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781803364568

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Crimson Road  to consider for review.

I loved returning to the world of Slatter's Sourdough stories, for a tale that draws together the threads of her recent novels, All The Murmuring Bones, The Path of Thorns and The Briar Book of the Dead.

Like the young women who are central to of those stories, Violet Zennor is alone in what is ostensibly a very male world. A young heiress surrounded by men in authority - the lawyer, the Bishop - she might balk at the prospect that her story will be all about being married off (and indeed, there is a suitor in the wings). But in a twist the made me smile, Violet is already actually busy balking at the other plans her father laid for her, plans that involved her training relentlessly from childhood for deadly combat - and also involve somewhere mysterious called the "Anchorhold". So relieved is Violet by her father's untimely death, and at not having to live the fate that he laid down for her, that the idea of marriage may almost be welcome to her.

But life never goes smoothly for a protagonist in Slatter's world. Across those earlier books we have seen her explore ideas of inheritance, of coming into adulthood and of women finding a way to survive with integrity and freedom in that male world. These ways are never as simple as "having a lot of wealth" because, really, the sources of wealth are always murky (as Violet's proves). They are though various, though often magical, and I was eager to see how Violet would deal with this predicament. As her arm begins to be twisted to follow the course planned for her, we may wonder if she will ever be able to control her own destiny? 

Of course as we have also seen in those earlier books there are ways around, even if not through. And Violet is aided by a sisterhood of the women we've already met. This could have come across as a bit of a whistlestop tour of the earlier protagonists, but Slatter is better than that. These are all women whose own stories clearly had more to be told, so in visiting them again, she answers the need any reader will have to learn a bit more about what happened next. Their various life lessons, magics and centres of protection act both as supports for Violet in her time of need and as little candles of hope in what has become a very dark world for her, hunted as she is by both dark monsters and the hypocritical church, which is willing to use the women it condemns to protect itself from those same monsters.

It all culminates, of course, in absolute bloody slaughter, not unlike the cause her father steered Violet towards - but with one key difference: that victory, and survival - if she can find them - won't be primarily through those hours and years of martial training but through friendship, love and solidarity.

A fine and gripping book, and one that rounds off this quartet of Sourdough novels (though I hope there will be more to come in future).

For more information about The Crimson Road, see the publisher's website here.