Heaven's Graveyard by Grace Curtis
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy, fantasy romance, gaslamp, historical fantasy, romantasy, fantasy mystery
Pages: 368
Published by DAW on June 16, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From the Sunday Times-bestselling author of Floating Hotel and Idolfire comes a science fantasy tale of history and myth, magic and mystery, perfect for fans of Shelley Parker-Chan and A. K. Larkwood
Two thousand years after the events of Idolfire, the world is on the brink of war, and the discovery of the enchanted city of Nivela threatens to push it over the brink

"What do you want to know?"

It’s been 2,000 years since the events of Idolfire, and we’re in a whole new Kite-drawn cargo ships race across thoroughly chartered seas, hauling the latest innovations in convenience and slaughter. It is developed, learned, interconnected, and on the brink of catastrophic war.
Archeologist Cod couldn’t care less about the conflict brewing between neighboring powers. She spends her days in happy obscurity, cataloging relics in the Republic of Asha and searching for clues about her lifelong obsession, the mythical hero Aleya Ana-Ulai. 
Then a letter arrives summoning her home. Cod’s old teacher has made the discovery of a lifetime. But her home is Palgaro, and the discovery—the ruins of the enchanted city of Nivela—is set to change the world. And not for the better…
Heaven's Graveyard is a sinister lesbian history mystery bringing the magic of Idolfire into a dangerous new century.

My Review:

This is the world created by Idolfire AND the world created by its lack. It’s also the story of one scholar’s obsession with history and one rogue assassin’s obsession with her. And, it’s a story about the havoc that obsession can create, both with its absorption and with the damage that its single-mindedness scatters like rain.

Let’s unpack that a bit, shall we?

Heaven’s Graveyard takes place in the same setting as the author’s earlier book, Idolfire. But this is not a sequel. Instead, this is that same world, centuries later. So far distant that the broken scraps of a dead empire that was the world of Idolfire, a world where magic is still a force in the world and at a time when wishes still had power in all the worst, cursed ways – has now become a gaslamp world at about the level of technology as our late 19th century. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells would have felt right at home.

Their technology rules. Maybe not our kind of tech, but tech all the same. And, like many a tech-based world, magic is considered a myth. A story for children. But literal magic isn’t the only thing that’s disappeared. So have the larger-than-life heroes of legend.

And that’s where Coda Canalluny (who very much insists on being called just “Cod” for reasons that become clear in the story), Doctor of Archaeology, curator at the Asha Civic Museum, comes into the picture.

Or rather, it’s where she came in as a child, when she discovered Professor D. Marr-Ahava’s book, Ashan Myths for Children and fell in love with the legendary Aleya Ana-Ulai. The hero of a tale so old that it had passed into myth. A story about standing up and defying a queen, undertaking a dangerous world-spanning quest, falling in love and having to give up that love for the good of the kingdom she came to rule.

A story about bringing back the magic that was stolen from her people by breaking into the lost ruins of a formerly world-spanning empire, and bringing her people’s most powerful artifact back home where it belonged.

People in Cod’s world, in Cod’s own profession, are sure that Aleya’s entire story is a myth. Because there is no magic in their world. (OTOH, we know it’s all TRUE, because it’s the story in the book Idolfire. Cod’s world is the world that was made out of Aleya and Kirby’s sacrifices for both of their widely-separated peoples.)

Cod is obsessed with proving that Aleya really existed, and that all the stories about her quest to the fabled capital of Nivela are historic truth and not merely mythological hyperbole. She’s spent her career trying to prove her hypothesis – just as her mentor has done.

So when she receives a ‘wire’ from that mentor, claiming a momentous discovery, Cod rushes back home, the last place she ever planned to return to, only to find that her beloved teacher was murdered mere hours before her arrival.

She’s certain his death has to do with his discovery and their shared quest. She just doesn’t know who or how or why. And she is so desperate to discover the truth of everything that she can’t see the threat standing right by her side until its far too late.

Escape Rating A-: Heaven’s Graveyard is linked to the previous book, Idolfire, in multiple ways – but I think it stands alone all the same. The stories are told in the same way, that the current quest is a result of an incident in the mythological past that no one in the stories present believes to have been true. Idolfire looked back at Nivela in its prime and Heaven’s Graveyard casts its eyes back at the quest to find the ruins of Nivela that no one believed existed then – and believe even less now.

Idolfire was not a story of Nivela itself, we didn’t need to know whether the legends that Aleya and Kirby followed were true or not. We just got caught up in them following that thread. Likewise here, we need to know what is believed in Cod’s today about what happened in the past. We don’t need the details of that past to follow along on this quest.

To be fair, there are moments that have a lot more resonance if you do know Aleya’s and Kirby’s story from Idolfire. But you don’t HAVE to know to get into Heaven’s Graveyard. Cod’s quest to find her mentor’s murderer and the truth of his potential discovery is more than enough story for one book.

As much as Heaven’s Graveyard is about Cod’s search for the historical Aleya and for the contemporary murderer, underneath that it’s a story about obsession, and that story starts with Aleya’s mother, a scientific genius who was obsessed with making space travel feasible. Vivette Canalluny’s career was cut short by poverty and single-motherhood. The birth of Coda was the literal ending, or coda, to all her dreams. Cod grew up in the shadow of her mother’s intellectual obsessions, her neglect, and her eventual madness.

So Cod mostly raised herself, knowing that she was a constant disappointment to a mother who resented her every breath. In her turn, Cod retreated into her own intellectual obsession with Aleya, and neglected the people around her in favor of her own obsession. Never realizing that her lover was obsessed with her and was willing to do anything to have her. Or get her back and use Cod’s obsessions as a way of punishing her while feeding, in turn, her own obsessions for money and power.

Because while Cod is looking for vindication of her theories, her frenemy Sparrow is following right behind her, looking for the power that Aleya brought home to her kingdom. Because power is a weapon that Sparrow can use and sell without a care in the world about the price the world will pay for the war she’s intending to arm on both sides.

I think the above represent the largest threads in this story, but they’re not the only ones. It’s a murder mystery wrapped in an epic quest filled with questions about how history gets remembered and what qualities turn a life into a legend and who gets to decide the legacy of that legend.

I don’t think ‘fun’ is the right word for this story, because it gets kind of deep and goes to some sad places. But it is absolutely compelling in all of its searching and questing for all the truths that Cod has hidden from herself and the truths that have been hidden from her along the way. The sapphic romance in Idolfire was a tragic one because Aleya and Kirby knew from the beginning that they could only be together in death. And they were. The sapphic romance in Heaven’s Graveyard isn’t so much tragic as it is utterly misguided and completely one-sided – at least until Cod finally opens her eyes to the world that’s been around her – and her own obsession – all along.