Esme Thorne profile

Place of birth: New Zealand
Esme Thorne specializes in the dark, analytical intersection of Crime and Fantasy. Her passion lies in stories where the rules of magic are used not just for epic battles, but as instruments for investigation, deception, or murder. She judges books based on the cleverness of the magical procedural element - can a spell be considered a forensic tool? Is a prophecy a solid alibi?

Esme Thorne's 6 reviews

Hemlock and Silver by T Kingfisher

T. Kingfisher's Hemlock & Silver is a breath of fresh, albeit occasionally poisoned, air for the Arcane Detective. While most writers lean on "vision" as the primary investigative sense, Kingfisher centres her 2025 mystery on the olfactory. Our protagonist, an ageing perfumer with a cynical edge, treats every crime scene like a chemical formula ...

9.5/10

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The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison

In the world of the Arcane Detective, we often deal with flashy spells and destructive magic. Katherine Addison's The Witness for the Dead offers something far more clinical and profound: a forensic intuition rooted in the transition between life and death. Our protagonist, Thara Celehar, is a "Witness for the Dead," a secular prelate tasked wit...

9.0/10

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The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

Stuart Turton has constructed the ultimate "Arcane Detective" challenge. In The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, the protagonist, Aiden Bishop, is trapped in a temporal loop. To solve the murder of Evelyn Hardcastle, he must inhabit the bodies of eight different witnesses over the course of the same day. As a skeptic who looks for holes in mag...

10.0/10

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Sweet Silver Blues by Glen Cook

As an investigator of the "Arcane Detective" niche, I find it impossible to ignore the crime scene where this entire genre began. Glen Cook's Sweet Silver Blues introduces us to Garrett, a private investigator in TunFaire - a city so thick with corruption and non-human species that it makes 1940s Los Angeles look like a choir rehearsal. ...

8.5/10

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A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett (Shadow of the Leviathan)

Bennett has finally stopped flirting with the edges of the law and dived headfirst into the gutter. A Drop of Corruption is a masterclass in what I call "Forensic Fantasy." In this world, magic is not a gift; it is an industrial byproduct, a sludge that greases the gears of a city built on the bones of the exploited. Our protagonist is...

9.5/10

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The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett (Shadow of the Leviathan)

Robert Jackson Bennett has successfully accomplished the near-impossible: crafting a true fantasy procedural that satisfies both the meticulous detective and the demanding world-builder. This novel earns a strong 9/10 because it understands that in crime fantasy, the rules of magic must be as reliable and exploitable as a witness statement or a ...

9.0/10

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