Graverobber Whiskey is the second book in this graverobber series by AM Kelly, following Graverobber Blues which I reviewed last week, and once again it follows Will Ashton and the motley crew of mages and mage-adjacents that comprise Ashland Investigations and associates. The book picks up less than a year after the events of Graverobber Blues, telling the story of an unexpected visit from a medium from overseas who seeks Ashton and Dirty Henry out for their assistance investigating the disappearance of her brother. The investigation, which feels like a bad idea from the start, ends up having unexpected consequences for all parties involved.
Thank you to the author, AM Kelly, who provided me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review!
This is where the spoilers start, beware!
I’m not surprised to say that I liked almost all the same elements in Graverobber Whiskey that I did in Graverobber Blues, but that the challenges I had with the book were also largely unchanged. I still found myself really enjoying the overall premise—I am always a sucker for a sapphic fantasy, and the fact that it involves necromancy is only a plus—and for the most part, the cast of main characters were enjoyable to read. Although the timeline of this story isn’t quite as tight as the story in Graverobber Blues, it’s still constrained to a fairly narrow window of time, which contributes to the pacing of the story in a positive way and makes sure that things feel like they’re moving along without dragging. Although I noticed more typographical errors in this book than in the previous one, I still found that the sparser prose worked for the story and characters and that the “action” scenes were easy to follow. And lastly, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the found family characters that comprise the core of Ashland Investigations are really very likeable and there is a real sense that they’ll go to war for each other if they have to.
In my review of Graverobber Blues I noted that I would have found it to be an interesting angle for Ashton’s character development if she had done some confronting of her complicity with/the privilege she gains from the social structures that surround her—namely, what things were made possible for her only because society believed her to be a white man, and does it really serve her or anyone she associates with for her to blindly obey those social structures rather than challenging them. However, following the burning down of Ashton’s university at the end of the previous book, it seemed that in Graverobber Whiskey all of Ashton’s academic ambition has dried up, which means that she is no longer quite so concerned with maintaining her reputation in a way that lets her participate in schooling… and consequently means that she never does end up confronting any of those privileges or social mores. There is a bit of talk at the beginning of Graverobber Whiskey about how Ashton is no longer quite as welcome to court Rosheen since she’s not making a decent living, and there’s also some offhand references to how dangerous it is for Dirty Henry’s Black wife Tilly (who, incidentally, is only ever talked about but never actually appears on-page as best I remember), but nothing else happens that would force Ashton into the position of confronting her privilege.
Instead, this whole story is about Anne Devereaux, née Valois, the younger sister of Gabriel Valois who was the primary antagonist of the previous book. I’ll confess—as much as I like the core group of Ashland Investigations characters (Ashton, Rosheen, Dirty Henry, J.P., and Vic), I actually find it extremely difficult to care all that much about any of the Valois family. All three of them who appear in this book—Gabriel, Anne, and their younger brother Henri—are privileged, self-centered, and evil to a degree that actually at a certain point started to seem comical rather than actually threatening. Anne alternates between shrill and spoiled harpy who’s dumb as a box of rocks, promiscuous femme fatale who is extremely free with her romantic attentions, and scheming blackmailer willing to sacrifice anyone and anything to get what she wants; Henri couldn’t care less about anything except his own standing within the Valois family, and despite being the son of someone who seems to be a pretty notoriously powerful necromage, is simultaneously very powerful and very ignorant of the weight of his power.
Of the three it’s Gabriel who has the most potential as an antagonistic character, but any potential depth and complexity is lost under how enormously unlikable he is in Graverobber Blues and also the fact that Ashton, as our point-of-view character, seems patently not interested in ruminating on the horrors Gabriel has endured and how that might inform his behavior. And that’s a bummer, because we could have gotten some interesting character development out of it! Ashton could have seen parallels between both of their experiences being forced to play roles; she could have come to understand that Valois’ extremely unpleasant outward behaviors are a defense mechanism after literal years spent being isolated from his family and abused by a much older man. Instead the extent of Ashton’s reflections seem to be “damn, that’s crazy. Anyway, Valois sucks!” She doesn’t even really react to the very heavy insinuation that Hoffman was sexually abusing Gabriel, and it feel like it’s going to come as an absolute shock to her in the next book that Gabriel and Johnson are in love.
All that said, though, overall I did enjoy this read! It gets a total of 3.5 stars from me, which is half a star lower than Graverobber Blues but which still means that I enjoyed the time I spent reading it and would recommend it to other folks who like stories like this one—sapphic fantasy, necromacy, and most importantly found family.
Pleasure: ★★★☆☆
Purpose: ★★★☆☆
Prose: ★★★★☆
Plot: ★★★☆☆
Personal: ★★★★☆