Fantasy Series Page for The Darkwater Saga

Fantasy noir is a subgenre of fantasy that mixes the traditions of the hard-bitten detectives of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett with popular fantasy tropes. This is often accomplished within modern urban settings, like Harry Dresden in modern-day Chicago in The Dresden Files. In The Darkwater Saga, our detective, Willet Dura works within a late medieval fantasy setting, working as the king’s reeve (detective).

YES! The Darkwater Series is complete. Some of my favorite fantasy series look as though they’re never going to get finished, which is disappointing. I’m hopeful those authors will finish, but life is difficult and a lot of times, maybe even the most of times, events don’t go as we’ve planned.

The books really need to be read in order. One of the key features of the series, especially the detective piece, is that every thing and each detail is important. For example, there is information in the introductory novel that is critical for the last book.

The Darkwater Saga is for adults. I tried to present war and its impact on its survivors in as realistic a way as possible and this naturally leads to some scenes that I think are a bit too gritty for children. The inspiration for this was my father, who returned from Vietnam with PTSD that followed him for the rest of his life. Some parents may read the series and pass it on to their children, some may not. Willet Dura is a survivor from the last war. He’s a bit darker as a hero than some protagonists, but I like to think that he shines a bit brighter because of it.

That is a much deeper question than it seems. Read and find out.

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Here is an excerpt from a review on Goodreads (567 Reviews – 4.49 Average Rating) that I think sums up what I was going for.

I had considered the reviewing each book of the trilogy separately, but the reality is they could be one near-1500 page volume, so close do the books follow on each other and so intricately are they entwined. There’s hardly any repeat of information from the previous books (which I, reading them all in the course of a week, appreciated, but I feel for anyone who had to wait a year to complete the series).

This is one intricately-plotted story. Nothing is wasted; everything is important enough to come back again, no matter how inconsequential it seems at the beginning. The world-building is incredibly intricate, with complex politics not only amongst monarchs and their courts, but also within the church (and their relations to said monarchs), and even those politics vary by region, as they would in real life. From one kingdom to the next, cultures change, traditions differ, accents appear. There was a ton of thought put into building this world

….the final is truly the masterpiece. I can’t see any way it could have more fittingly concluded the story. It’s bittersweet, as the best heroic tales are (Lord of the Rings, for example), and the world can never be as it once was, but maybe–in time, when healing has run its course and some of the horror has washed away–it can be better, and they’ll be better prepared when evil raises its head again.