A Winter’s Mercy by Phil Williams

Jen reviews A Winter’s Mercy, the third book in Phil Williams‘ military fantasy series, The Blood Scouts.

An eARC was received in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to Phil Williams. A Winter’s Mercy is out on October 27, 2025!

They say if you see the Stranded, it ’s already too late…

Tasked with transporting a monster-hunting “ghost” to the Vulgar Division artillery unit, far from the fighting, Wild Wish is ready to take a break for the winter. Their destination, Lake Harmonial, is a place of peace and tranquillity. An idyllic, safe retreat.

Until now.

This ghost is no ordinary soldier, and Command want Wild Wish with him for a reason. When the ice comes to Harmonial, it will bring a threat that could unbalance the entire war.

One that only the Blood Scouts can stop.

These peaceful woods contain forces darker than any Wish has seen before. Win or lose, this mission is going to leave deep and terrible scars.

Return to the world of the Rocc for another thrilling, chilling chapter in the One War, as the Blood Scouts come to face the true cost of survival.

At the front, some hundred metres out of the village, a soldier hiding behind a tree trunk flagged her down and held up three fingers, pointing ahead. She saw it for herself anyway. Three dark shapes in the empty road, mounted. She lifted her rifle to scope them out, Emi skidding up alongside her on one side and Latebite taking a knee at the other, rifle up. The creature caught her breath, as Latebite said, “There’s an ugly little bastard.”

Into Dust by Mazzy Star

I haven’t read a lot this year, but I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to read an ARC of A Winter’s Mercy the third book in The Blood Scouts series – which has quickly risen to be one of my favourite military fantasy series, due in part to my love for Wild Wish (I even named one of my bunnies after her) and to the fact that it’s just a hell of a good series. Thank you to Phil Williams for the ecopy in exchange for review.

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I’ll try to stay vague due to spoilers.

One of my favourite things about A Winter’s Mercy and this series in general has been the characters and the dynamics between Wish and the members of her Blood Scouts – most are misfits and slightly off the wall, but their antics offer some lightness and fun in the grimness of the landscape around them.

The original Blood Scouts centered around a team of all women soldiers, but over the course of this series, it has grown to include others – it is war, and Mr. Williams is hard on his characters – just saying, you don’t want to get too attached to any one of them. I don’t even trust him with Wild Wish, to be honest.
 
We do have some returning faces here, which I think helps to maintain the heart of that core group – keeping the fun connections between characters, while giving me people to root for and stress over with every turn of the page, wondering who may or may not make it through the mission.

A Winter’s Mercy offers a few new important faces to the story with Gaussica – a ghost soldier that has joined the team for this mission. Gaussica is a whole bucket of strangeness, and I really enjoyed speculating about his past. I eat that kind of stuff up with a spoon.

And Pitt, a young man who is being apprenticed to Dalton Terrifold, a very powerful Witlacer for the Drail forces – giving us a face, so to speak, to the consequences of the choices being made on both sides… and I don’t think my heart has hurt so much as it did here – for everyone involved. I don’t know about you all, but I like caring about the characters enough to feel that gut-punch when they’re lost or when they have to make a decision that tears them (and us) apart.

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The story in A Winter’s Mercy itself can be brutal, but it always has a human element to connect us. It reminds us that war is not pretty or even fair. There is no shying away from the nastiness of what’s involved. The losses on both sides of the war, the tough decisions, or even how the weight of right and wrong are not always a factor in those decisions – sometimes it’s just about surviving, and duty, and even that Spock quote from The Wrath of Khan comes into the equation, because there are no good choices in wartime really, so it can sometimes be a gut-punch while reading, the positive being in those small mercies that you can take from its events.

A Winter’s Mercy is filled with action and an underlying building fear, between the new threat of the Nevolk and the reality of where this current mission is headed for Wild Wish. I loved everything about this emotional rollercoaster of a book – the action, the darkness, the humour, the humanity, and the hope. What a brilliant series this is shaping up to be.