AUTHOR INFORMATION: Ilona Andrews is the pseudonym for the husband-and-wife writing team of Ilona Gordon & Andrew Gordon. Together, Andrew and Ilona are the co-authors of the New York Times bestselling Kate Daniels urban fantasy series and several other series. They live in Texas and enjoy plotting more adventures for the BDH to gorge on.

OFFICIAL BOOK BLURB: When Maggie wakes up cold, filthy, and naked in a gutter, it doesn’t take her long to recognize Kair Toren, a city she knows intimately from the pages of the famously unfinished dark fantasy series she’s been obsessively reading and re-reading while waiting years for the final novel.

Her only tools for navigating this gritty world of rival warlords, magic, and mayhem? Her encyclopedic knowledge of the plot, the setting, and the characters’ ambitions and fates. But while she quickly discovers she cannot be killed (though many will try!), the same cannot be said for the living, breathing characters she’s coming to love—a motley band that includes a former lady’s maid, a deadly assassin, various outrageous magical creatures, and a dangerously appealing soldier. Soon, instead of trying to get home, she finds herself enmeshed in the schemes—and attentions—of dueling princes, dukes, and villains, all while trying to save them and the kingdom of Rellas from the way she knows their stories will end: in a cataclysmic war.

FORMAT/INFO: This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me is 480 pages long divided over four named parts with forty-three chapters, and an epilogue. In this book, narration is in the first-person, exclusively via Maggie Haley. This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me is the first volume of in the Maggie The Undying epic fantasy trilogy.

March 31, 2026 will mark the North American hardback, e-book & audiobook publication of This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me via Tor Books. Cover illustration is done by Andrew Davis.

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: There are authors and then there are storytellers, there are fantasy stories and then there are epic fantasy sagas. There are books which readers read and stories that become embedded in the readers’ minds & hearts. This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews introduces us to Maggie the Undying and easily is one of the (if not THE) top read of 2026 for me (I’ve read it five times already as I write this review). This book is dedicated to readers who dreamed about getting lost in a book. I must congratulate house Andrews for the thrilling & immersive read which I experienced as I want the sequels & moar….

The story begins with our main character Maggie Haley walking up wet and naked in the city of Kair Torren, capital city of Rellas. The weird thing is until today, this was a secondary fantasy world featured in an unfinished fantasy series titled The Rise Of Kair Torren (with two published books called THE THIEVES OF THE NORTH, & THE LORDS OF THE EAST) that Maggie has been besotted with since her teenage years. Now she finds herself in that very same world and has to figure out:

However Maggie has a few, aces up her (currently non-existent) sleeves, she has an encyclopedic knowledge of the events that have occurred and are yet to occur within this land. Plus she knows a lot about the characters’ motivations, & thoughts: both regal & commoner, and POV & non-POV ones.  This cerebral Rellaspedia will be one of her main strengths as she tries to assist certain folks to avert a huge & bloody crisis.  There’s also her other magical ability to come back from death wholly no matter the manner of her passing. She doesn’t quite know the “how and the why” of her strange ability, but she will use it to her advantage whenever she can. Maggie wants to stop the tragedy that’s set to unfold within Rellas. As she realizes that she cares deeply about the people & characters who have inhabited within her mind for the last decade or so. With everything knowledge wise at her disposal, Maggie decides to tamper with the flow of events and change the fates of hundreds (if not thousands) of people.

There are many things that I could tell you as to why I’m in love with this book (and fantasy series “I say series because while the deal is for three books but I think this story can go beyond 3 books”). Primarily it’s the authorial writing style, from their Kate Daniels saga to the Hidden Legacy series to the Innkeeper volumes. Every series of theirs has given the readers fantastic characters that they can root for or rail against. The dialogue is snappy, the prose is tight and lastly their stories are the type that entertain and become epic along the way.

Maggie The Undying is in many ways a quintessential Ilona Andrews story but it is also a different story than they have ever written before. It is EPIC, it is magical and if I had to do an elevator pitch for it, it would be ASOIAF meets Alice in Wonderland but without the grimdark edges. It’s a testament to the authors’ skills who can flesh out multiple characters within a singular POV story. Speaking of characterization, almost all the characters who get introduced within this first volume, are fully fledged and three dimensional. Coming from a singular POV story and especially from a first-person narrative, this facet of the story is exceptional. Books such as Assassin’s Apprentice, Kushiel’s Dart, Prince of Thorns, Name of The Wind, Blood Song, Kings of the Wyld, etc. are few and far in between. All these aforementioned titles have narrators who are charismatic and fall on all shades of the moral spectrum. Herein the authors do something akin to these stories while also providing a side character cast that is as fleshed out as the main character and have their own motivations to play out.

While Maggie has such a fascinating narrative voice, she’s still human and has her blind spots. To cover these blind spots, she has new allies and found family beside her.  I could talk more about Raymond Karis or Solentine Dagarra or Clover or even the main antagonist but I suspect the authors have plans for almost all characters. I can’t wait to see who takes bigger roles in the future sequels. I suspect quite a few of these characters will become fan favourites and I hope akin to the Kate Daniels, Innkeeper & Hidden Legacy books, the authors provide more stories from their viewpoints.

“When the Eight Families went to war, the world burned.  The Great Families had been playing musical chairs with the throne of Rellas for the last eight hundred years, and how long each dynasty lasted depended on how good they were at pitting the other seven families against each other…. the current king, had been teetering on the edge of a full psychotic break for a decade, and the tensions among the Great Families were at an all-time high.”

Another beguiling aspect of this book was the worldbuilding. In this regards, this reminded me a lot of ASOIAF & Codex Alera with its varied geographical details, the royal houses that govern the various regions & the powers they possess. The authors brilliantly provide a medieval world that’s as complex as ours and then there’s the fascinating small touches with toilet paper, clothing details, LGBT/non-binary folks inclusion and naming nomenclature. I recall when I first read A Game Of Thrones, how immersive the story was due to its worldbuilding (heraldry descriptions, world history, and geographical tenets) & similarly with Codex Alera with its Romanic culture infused lands.

With This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me, I felt a similar deep immersion and while the world is a dark, medieval one. The authors have managed to brilliant thread the needle in making it realistic but not grimdark or unnecessary violent. I must also highlight Stephanie Stein’s crucial role in the expansion of the plot from a more intimate & less political story (as envisioned by the authors originally) into this genre-bending & fun story. I had read a small excerpt of the story a few years ago & this finished version is more complex, politically intriguing and something that I didn’t know I needed. So my eternal thanks to Stephanie for her editorial hand in elevating the story alongside the authors into its current amazing form.

“It would all end in blood and fire….who wanted nothing to do with the swamp that was the powerful underbelly of Kair Torren and the narrative had crushed her in the worst way possible…”

The main plot of the story is about averting a political takeover which includes an event called “the night of thousand fires”, the event being as brutal and destructive as it sounds. The authors have shaped this story very much akin to a thriller, wherein the MC has certain knowledge of pre-ordained events and tries to carefully avert certain situations to change the eventual bloody outcome. This was fun to read as Maggie narrates what she knows and the readers get to know about it in real time as well. The joy is in finding out how she accomplishes with her cerebral Rellaspedia and what new consequences her actions unleash.

This story really flowed so smoothly because Maggie is very much a fan and so that resonated with me on such a deep level. Her love for the story and characters is something that all of us can keenly feel. Be it the six duchies or Westeros or Roshar or the Westlands or even post apocalyptic Atlanta, we the readers are transported in those worlds and care for it as deeply as our own. The world of Rellas is a brilliantly written one and as a reader, one can’t help but be drawn in via Maggie’s love and enthusiasm. The authors have meant this as a complement and given how re-readable their books are, I can only thank them for their venture into epic fantasy as I’ve been clamouring for them to do since the last decade.

Herein the book follows a semi-traditional epic fantasy plot structure but has enough twists within to differentiate it and make it fresh. I’m purposefully being vague because of spoilers but there’s a murder plot, a serial killer plot , soap-making as well as a missing person(s) mystery. Plus not to mention all the various story set-up for events that will happen in the sequels. All in all, there’s so much happening and none of it feels extraneous or excessive.

I would describe this as an epic fantasy with dark undertones as funnily the story within the Rise Of Kair Torren books is a gritty & grimdark one. But herein the authors smartly blunt those edges while still maintaining the dark feel. What I mean is that authors have provided a story that's about a dark world but the reading experience is a comfortable one. I also have to highlight that the authors are fans of David Gemmell’s heroic fantasy stories and there’s some wonderful character similarities to be found within. From the grizzled veteran to the mercenary family to the head of the assassin guild, these grey characters are so fascinatingly written that one can’t help but care for them and watch out for what they do next. There’s going to be a lot of fan favourite characters for every type of reader to root for.  The action sequences are more of the personal kind except for the climax which is a mass affair. There’s no big battles as such but the climax will provide succor to the most ardent action fantasy fan.

The prose is very solid throughout and while nobody will be calling it purple. I found it to be solid and very geared to make the readers’ experience a fascinating one. The authors’ have a knack for writing comedy and there’s just the right amount interspersed within. Another thing I wish to highlight for IA fans who have read their various series is about the epic fantasy genre. While this book is very much paced properly, readers who are more accustomed to the urban fantasy genre will have to understand the more laid-back nature of epic fantasy and the worldbuilding involved. In most (if not all) epic fantasy books, the author must worldbuild alongside laying out the story and character arcs. This leads to a seemingly slower pace as compared to urban fantasy stories wherein the worldbuilding exercise is far less intensive as the world is usually our own.

Many readers might disregard this as a romantasy book and they would be very, very wrong. This book has a tendril of romance but it’s ensconced within the story in a neat fashion. For those readers who are wanting a spicy romantic read, they won’t find this book to be that either. The authors have tried really hard to make this story into its own thing and I applaud them for it.

One thing I must note is that this book & story is very, very cinematic. I could very easily visualize this as a TV series akin to Game Of Thrones with a Maggie voiceover ala Dexter. The same, charming narrative voice that Michael C. Hall so smoothly provided can be done herein. Albeit with an actor who can bring Maggie’s brilliance and spunk alive. I was thinking a young Willa Fitzgerald would have been terrific with this. I seriously hope that someone from Hollywood does consider this book series as it would make a for a thrilling, fun & addictive show.

CONCLUSION: Filled with mesmerizing characters, a medieval fantasy world that defies genre trappings and a hope-filled story that evokes joy. This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me is the exact type of exceptional fantasy that I’ve been dying to read. This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me is easily my top read of 2026 & it will be nigh impossible to top it IMHO. Get ready to meet Maggie The Undying as that’s a name you won’t be forgetting soon after March 31^st 2026.