Review - Paladin's Grace by T Kingfisher

Paladin's Grace

T Kingfisher
Orbit, 8 April 2025 
Available as: PB, 360pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN (PB): 9780356524313

I'm grateful to Orbit for sending me a copy of Paladin's Grace  to consider for review.

Stephen is a broken paladin. His god dead, he's trying to find purpose - and to prevent the berserk rage overtaking him, because with the Saint of Steel gone missing, Stephen is afraid he'll lose control and commit mass murder. 

The rest of the time, he knits socks...

Grace is a perfumer. A Woman with Secrets, she's already lost everything - twice - and is desperately afraid it'll happen again.

So when Grace is chased through a graveyard by malevolent priests, and literally jumps into Stephen's arms to put them off the scent, she's being practical, not looking for an offer of rescue, still less for romance. And Stephen's too afraid of letting go and losing control to admit the feelings Grace stirs in him.

And yet. And yet...

Paladin's Grace is a fun fantasy romance. Kingfisher's setting - a medieval-ish town crammed with feuding priests, plotting diplomats and, as the toll of bodiless heads mounts up, murderers - is well realised without being over-serious. Stephen's, and Grace's, sensitivities, are well drawn. Their respective drives to resist romantic entanglement war with natural feelings - STRONG feelings, my goodness, as Kingfisher makes clear - but both, of course, are too embarrassed, not to say confused, to explain to each just what they're going through.

And in any case they have no time. There are murders to solve!

The two protagonists are interesting and fun - Stephen may sound from my description above as though he's stepped out of a D&D adventuring party, but he's an intelligent man, not just an arm with a sword, and a complex one at that, trying to navigate his way in a world he never expected or wanted to live in. Grace is a resourceful and determined woman who's suffered appallingly at the hands of entitled men, and is determined not to fall into any man's power. Her profession as a perfumier gives her an ambivalent place in society, allowing access to privileged circles while not being part of them. (As becomes clear when her secrets, and her life, begin to unravel, her foundations in her profession are shaky too).

Through all this, a developing plot concerning poisonings in diplomatic circler, as well as those unidentified heads, adds tension, putting both Stephen and Grace in danger and driving the story towards a violet conclusion.

While I might, perhaps, have hoped that this violence would come on a little sooner - we know it's coming, don't we? - the anticipation mirrors, er, another kind of anticipation that's building of course in our protagonists. Will they or won't they? Well, fair reader, I don't deal in spoilers, you'll just have to read the book.

All in all, great fun and - I understand - a standalone adventure in a wider world that this author is currently developing with more volumes to be published shortly. I'll be watching for them.

For more information about Paladin's Grace, see the publisher's website here.