The Bone Raiders is the first book in a full throttle chaos driven epic fantasy by Jackson Ford. Released 12th Aug 2025 by Hachette on their Orbit imprint, it's 480 pages and is available in paperback, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout. For Kindle Unlimited subscribers, this book is currently included in the KU subscription library to borrow and read for free.
Sarcastic, sapphic friendly, found family, female MCs, giant fire breathing land lizards, and lots and lots of fighting. It's action driven and often quite frenetically paced. It's set in a kind of fantasy steppes with horse riders, yurt dwelling nomadic groups and a fantasy-adjacent Genghis Khan overlord antagonist (with his huge standing army).
The characters manage to be distinct and well delineated and readers won't have trouble keeping them separated. It is quite violent and the language is rough (R-rated). Plus the ground dragons are pretty darned cool.
Four stars. For readers of doorstop epic campaign fantasy in the same general category as Joe Abercrombie, R.F. Kuang, and Glen Cook. It would be a good choice for public library acquisition, binge/buddy read, or possibly for SF/F bookclub discussion. Book 2 in the series due out in 2nd quarter 2026 from the same publisher.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
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