Dead Hand Rule
core novel 2025 The Craft Sequence
Record
| First published | 2025 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.31 (347 ratings, collected 2026-08-20) |
| Page count | 432 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781250290366 |
Synopsis
Dead Hand Rule concludes the Craft Wars arc that began with Dead Country and Wicked Problems. In a postindustrial world where magic operates in plain view, Tara Abernathy and the King in Red convene a summit in Alt Coulumb, attempting to unite the world's rival powers against the looming threat of Dawn and an approaching menace from beyond the world known as the skazzerai. Each of the great powers gathered brings its own strategy for survival, and its own idea of who deserves to remain standing once the crisis has passed, so cooperation is far from guaranteed. Familiar figures such as Belladonna Albrecht and Elayne Kevarian return amid the political maneuvering, personal reunions, and factional infighting that threaten to derail the summit before it can produce any unified response to the danger closing in on them all.
Where it sits
- Universe: The Craft Sequence
- Series: The Craft Sequence core; position 9 of 9 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Max Gladstone
Notes
- From the series record (The Craft Sequence): The first six novels are each independently standalone within one shared world rather than a single strict reading order (the author's own note); the final three, marketed as 'The Craft Wars', form a direct continuation that does run forward in time book to book. All nine are treated as one Core Canon sequence per this project's usual practice for a single author's continuous secondary-world project.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within the series The Craft Sequence: position 9 of 9: previous Wicked Problems (2024)
Sources
- Encyclopedic overview: The Craft Sequence
- Author's own series page: The Craft Sequence
- https://thenerddaily.com/max-gladstone-dead-hand-rule-author-interview/
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