Richard Swan may be forging headlong into a new era of the Sovan Empire with his current series, The Great Silence, but his latest novella is all about taking readers back to where it began. The Scour returns us to the days of Swan's Empire of the Wolf trilogy, when Justice Sir Konrad Vonvault traveled the land solving mysteries, adjudicating legal cases, and performing executions in the name of empire.
If this is the first you're hearing of Empire of the Wolf and Swan's work, fret not; The Scour is both a compact treat for longtime fans as well as an excellent entry point into the saga. It's set before the main series, when Sir Konrad and his taskman, Dubine Bressinger, are performing their usual rounds to see to the needs of the Empire. But the mysteries they find in the coastal village of Gdansburg are anything but.
Read on for a SPOILER-FREE review of The Scour.
Review: The Scour by Richard Swan
The Scour is published by Grimdark Magazine, and just as their previous novella Casthen Gain expanded the wold of Essa Hansen's Graven trilogy, this new book adds intriguing new layers to Empire of the Wolf. The main difference here is that this feels much more like a discreet adventure that's easy to dip in and enjoy with no knowledge of the series, as opposed to a side story that expands the overall lore in essential ways. The main ways it resonates out into the larger series are in how it adds to characters like Vonvault, Bressinger, and Justice Lady Resi August, and their intertwined relationships.
The original trilogy began as a fantasy mystery saga, but by the time it concluded with 2024's The Trials of Empire, it had grown into something closer to a brooding dark epic fantasy where eldritch forces collided and the fate of the Sovan Empire shifted forever. But for myself, and I suspect many other readers, there's always been something about the closer-quarters style of mystery from the first book, The Justice of Kings, that remains appealing. If you ever wished you could have just seen Vonvault solving more mysteries in a fantasy world as grim and brutal as any other out there, then The Scour is absolutely for you.
This novella begins with Vonvault and Bressinger making their rounds of the empire to see to the legal needs of its people, but it isn't long before they're drawn into a pair of seemingly disconnected cases that hold horrifying secrets. The people of the coastal city of Gdansburg claim their lighthouse is haunted, and that this malady caused most of its residents to flee as the region deteriorated. The locals have also taken another Justice, one of Vonvault's contemporaries named Sir Bronislav Havener, prisoner on charges of murder. Justices travel the empire doling out the word of the law; for one to be accused of so heinous a crime stretches Vonvault's disbelief to its limits, not to mention that there is no legal precedent for prosecuting one.
At just under 150 pages, The Scour is a tightly woven tale that won't keep you waiting long to see how the mysteries of Havener and the lighthouse play out. It's easy to read in a single sitting, especially because it's not so easy to put down. Swan keeps the pacing sharp, with Vonvault pinging between the two mysteries until the bigger picture sweeps you inexorably along. Its creepy atmosphere makes it a great choice to curl up with on a spooky October night...so long as you leave a light on.
The Scour plays to Richard Swan's strengths
I've already mentioned the mystery element and the setting; both are very well-wrought, and served as a great reminder of why I fell in love with Swan's writing in the first place. Another aspect of The Scour that I found really enjoyable was the humor. For as intense as some scenes of the novella got, Vonvault or Bressinger were never far with a wry joke. That's especially true for Bressinger, a character I loved seeing at an earlier point in his life in this book after the traumatic events of the main trilogy.
That said, there is a running joke throughout the book that has to do with Bressinger's visits to a local brothel; I imagine reader mileage may vary on whether it lands for you or is tiresome. For my part, I didn't think it was overdone too badly, and I did cackle the very first time it suddenly came up. Swan has a great enough gift for dialogue that it's easy to get lost in the casual back-and-forth between the characters, whether they're debating law and arcane mysteries or the woes of bodily inflammation.
In many ways, The Scour is exactly what you'd hope for from a novella about Sir Justice Konrad Vonvault's days solving mysteries. It reads almost like a greatest hits of the features of the novels, with discussions about jurisprudence complimenting investigations into the supernatural, and local politics mingling with the wider scope of the empire's expansion. The Scour works so well that if I didn't already love Empire of the Wolf so much, I'd wonder if this shorter medium was even better suited to Vonvault and Bressinger's adventures.
Verdict
The Scour is an excellent addition to the Empire of the Wolf series, which also doubles as a great sampler of what's in store in the full trilogy for those who haven't already read it. Vonvault is at his best when he's chasing down leads and arguing the finer points of the law until everyone around him either drops dead from boredom or wants to beat him over the head with a club (which, of course, they cannot do, because he would charge them with assaulting an imperial officer). The novella format works exceptionally well for this story, and if Richard Swan wrote 10 more just like it with Vonvault solving various cases, I would devour them all.
The Scour is available now from Grimdark Magazine.