Kill All Wizards (The Barbaric Ledgers, #1) by Jedediah Berry Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, sword and sorcery
Series: Barbaric Ledgers #1
Pages: 136
Published by Tordotcom on June 16, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
SWORDS, SORCERY, AND A SPOT OF TEA
Kill All Wizards is a blood-soaked romp through high society—picture Conan the Barbarian caught up in a comedy of manners, and you're almost prepared for this unmissable new series.
We could think of nothing but the barbarian. He had come here, surely, to murder or marry someone, to exact revenge, or to say or do something very scandalous. We could hardly wait to see which it was. We hoped it would be all of them.
The barbarian traveled far to consult the wizards of the empire. Instead of lending their aid, they ensorcelled him, exploited his strength, and stole his sword. They should not have done that.
Now the barbarian plans to kill every wizard who wronged him, even if that means blending in with their vile dressing in finery, taking tea in exclusive clubs, and reserving the best box at the theater.
Oh, he hates it all with the fiery passion of his savage heart—but not as much as he hates these wizards.
My Review:
Conan the Barbarian meets Bridgerton – minus the romance. Or at least minus the romance SO FAR. That’s a combination that you’d think wouldn’t work, but actually does. And where it doesn’t it’s because it’s not intended to.
Gotchimus, the barbarian of the title, has a problem with wizards. Or rather, he has a problem with the magical crap that wizards leave behind them. Specifically, the hex heaps. Think of the hex heaps as a toxic waste dump with ZERO environmental controls. Not even signs that say “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” – which they absolutely need. Instead, the accumulation of toxic magical waste has grown up over centuries, not nearly far enough outside of town, and lures in both idiotic adventurers AND adventurous boys. The former should know better, but do it anyway. The latter, well, this sort of behavior is actually sort of the reason that the phrase “boys will be boys” has become a cliche.
Gotchimus lost his brother in the hex heaps. They were young, they were desperate. And once the heaps had poor Leaf he couldn’t escape and Gotch couldn’t get him out without getting sucked in himself.
When Gotch first arrived in town, he wasn’t so much looking for revenge against the wizards as he was searching for some kind of justice. Such as cleaning up – or even just a good faith attempt at cleaning up – the hex heaps. The wizards’ council wouldn’t listen to him. In fact, they deployed their arcane bureaucracy to make sure that he never even received a hearing.
When that didn’t work, they did their damndest to put him out of their misery. By dumping him in the middle of a vengeful old godling’s territory, certain that the godling would wipe the forest floor with the barbarian. The godling failed.
And that’s what practically FORCED Gotchimus the barbarian to make a list, check it as many times as necessary, in order that he can be absolutely certain to, as the title so succinctly and provocatively put it, kill all the wizards.
Escape Rating B: I picked this up instead of my originally planned book because I had been reading a LOT of mysteries this month and I had a lot more to come. While the idea that mysteries lead directly into spooky season does work for me – also logically as murder could easily lead to ghosts, ghoulies and things that go bump in the night – I felt a craving for a bit of fantasy to balance things out – or at least to keep too much of a good thing (I love mysteries) from turning into something not exactly wonderful. Which is why I dug this out of the virtually towering TBR pile. (Also because I picked up the ARC for the next book in the series (Devouring Gods) and remembered that I hadn’t read this first book yet.
There was something about the tone of the storytelling that gave me a bit of déjà vu. It sounded familiar, even though the story was completely new. (And I hadn’t really read the blurb first. I looked at the page length and decided this would be a great palate-cleanser – or at least a quick one.) So I kept reading and that’s when it hit me that the reason the tone felt familiar was because I’d read stuff very similar a LONG time ago. Kill All Wizards is a chip off the old block of good, “old skool”, sword and sorcery. Like Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories back in the day. Or the Conan the Barbarian comics that the author himself admits to getting hooked on way back in his own reading life.
Sword and sorcery as a genre was exactly what the name implied, stories where brawn meets magic, and in the case of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, one of the progenitors of the whole genre, a world where capricious gods and godlings interfere in the lives of ordinary citizens, and where it often takes a big sword and a small thief to keep the world on a somewhat even keel.
In the case of Kill All Wizards, that story is mixed liberally with the kind of “comedy of manners” that Jane Austen used to write. Or that makes the whole Bridgerton series so much fun. Gotch plays the games of high society, knowing that he doesn’t actually fit in – and doesn’t intend to – but keeps the mages and the rest of society so amused by how he doesn’t fit that he’s able to use their fascination to distract them from what he’s really doing.
Killing all the wizards.
The same flamboyance of costume and language is also on display in The Wizard Who Kept Himself Suspicious, which only misses being “sword and sorcery” because there are no swords. But it reads surprisingly similarly now that I’ve had a chance to think about it a bit more.
The thing about sword and sorcery in general, as well as Kill All Wizards in particular, is that the stories are told in what seems like, let’s call it flowery, language. It’s not literary, in that it’s not trying to woo the reader with the prettiness of the way that the words are put together or the stylistic ruffles and flourishes of the prose. It’s the equivalent of a magician’s patter, it’s smoke and mirrors, it’s intended to give the sense of great gods and powers moving behind the scenes and dangerous secrets and terrible fates waiting to be revealed – while obscuring as much as possible until the great gods and powers strike the hero down – or believe they are about to. There is often a LOT of foreshadowing hidden among those ruffles and flourishes, and all of it is intended.
All of which is part of why The Wizard Who Kept Himself Suspicious works, and why its style might put some readers off. That’s true here as well. There’s always something going on beneath the surface and beneath all of the layers under that surface that is hinted at but not revealed until much later.
It does work in Kill All Wizards, and not just because the big reveal at the end, along with the teaser that follows it that lets both Gotch and the reader know that Gotch’s adventures are FAR from over, pulls the whole story back around to its beginning AND gives us the kind of information that makes you rethink the whole thing.
So now I’m really curious to see what Gotch – and the crew he’s gathered around him – will be up to in Devouring Gods. Especially because this next time, he’s not allowed – or not supposed to – kill the wizard after all. I can’t wait to see how that works out for him. IF that works out for him. I have my doubts on that score, but we’ll just have to see.
