REVIEWS: The Strains of Malice (released 24 Feb 2025)
Winner of the Literary Titan Gold Book Award March 2026
WRITTEN REVIEWS
"Poldark meets Gladiator...on another world." -- Halsgrove Publishing
"An authentic and well developed epic fantasy world with lots of heroes to root for and villains to dislike. It reminds me of ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’. -- LoveReading
"Beardmore is a fantastic storyteller with a penchant for meticulous details. He crafts a world so humanistically flawed and tremendously intriguing." -- onlinebookclub.org
"The book’s plot is complex, and it features a huge cast of characters, but Beardmore’s skill in developing his storylines is exceptional." -- BookBrowse
"The Strains of Malice stands out for immersive worldbuilding, well-timed twists, and a cast that is vivid and easy to root for." -- Literary Titan
“The meticulous attention to geography, climate, political structure, and social hierarchy gives Thera a texture most fantasy worlds do not have.” -- Professional book reviewer (India)
“A book for those who enjoy epic fantasy with genuine moral depth, rich and lovingly constructed world-building, villains to loathe, and fully and achingly human characters.”
-- Professional book reviewer (India)
"A sweeping and sophisticated debut." -- Professional book reviewer
"The Nessemiah is going to be one of the great epic fantasy series of this decade." -- Professional book reviewer
"Sharp, humane, politically intelligent and compulsively readable. This is historical fantasy operating at the very top of its game." -- Goodreads reviewer
"This is an exceptional debut in what promises to be a truly great series." -- Goodreads reviewer
"Extraordinary fantasy from a writer who clearly has the full scope of something huge already mapped out." -- Goodreads reviewer
Find the above quotes in the detailed reviews below, and much, much more...
LoveReading Review
(Read native LoveReading review here)
Goodreads Reviews
onlinbookclub.org Review
NB: The small number of reviews pre-dating 2025 are for the original self-published release of The Strains of Malice - Part One: Spite, released via KDP in July 2022. This is the same book as The Strains of Malice released in February 2025 and published by Halsgrove Publishing (Ryelands Books imprint).