As anyone who reads my reviews… or like… glances over my favorites shelf will know, I love a good snarky character. The snarkier the better. I love characters that don’t take anyone’s crap. So, generally, books with the word ‘bastards’ in the title is always going to be a good fit Needless to day, I got started on this listen immediately.

Let’s start with narration, because it’s awesome (and is most of the reason I experienced this book at all). Jeff Hays, you talented bastard. Why can’t I quit you? Oh, right… it’s because you’re SO GOOD AT THIS. Srsly!

Every character was unique, the gargoyles (sorry, grotesques. There’s a difference.) were all sort of gravelly-sounding, as described. There were some special effects used for demon voices and the like, which were awesome. The lady folk were all believably enough lady-sounding, the dudes were various levels of gruff, deep and gravelly. Accents were on point. Look, I’ve lived in Texas for almost 10 years and the best I can do accent-wise is to sound slightly less Canadian sometimes, and then really, really Canadian when I’m excited about something or talk to my mom for more than 5 seconds. I’m always sort of intrigued that someone can convincingly become so many different people all within the span of 7 hours or so. Jeff Hays does it every time though.

Anyways, back to the story! The main character (or one of them), is a no-nonsense, cigar smoking grotesque and I liked him immediately. He seems to actually care for the wards (non-possessed humans who are living under the gargoyles’ protection at the sanctuary of the cathedral in which the gargoyles reside). So, our story pretty much starts out with Morty (I’m assuming things on spelling. It’s short for Mordecai) planning on going out on a trip into the demon possessed wilds of North Carolina to pick up supplies for everyone at the cathedral, because some shenanigans are going to go down, and he’s almost out of cigars.

He stumbles on an unexpected human woman and her daughter, along with their very unexpected protector on his travels, and it turns out that the human is quite important in terms of this whole war with the demons thing. Cut to part two which is what happened at the sanctuary while Morty was out getting supplies, and then cut to part 3 which is THE RECKONING. This one was full of action, some of it more gruesome than the rest, and a fair bit of humor. It never plodded along, it was always pretty exciting, things happened that I didn’t fully expect, and so I can definitely call this one a win!

(I was given a free copy of this audiobook by the author/narrator/publisher in exchange for an honest review).