Read This: Four Dead Queens by Astrid Scholte

You know the best part of winter? Staying inside and reading. Preferably while snuggled up with a blanket. And tea. Honestly, why step outside at all? Particularly when you can visit new worlds and meet new people through the pages of a book, and all from the warm comfort of your living room. So if you’re looking for some reading recs to get you through this pre-spring drearyness, I’ve got you. Four Dead Queens while suck you and sweep you away, and you don’t even have to change out of your sweatpants.

Here’s what you can expect from this debut YA fantasy:

A Unique Setting

The country of Quadara is split up into four quadrants, each ruled by their own queen. The quadrants have been walled off from each other for hundreds of years, and therefore are quite different. Each quadrant has its own culture and beliefs, and its own role in providing for the kingdom.

Toria– the intellectual quarter that values education and ambition. Except down by the docks, where they value black market auctions of stolen goods.
Ludia– the pleasure quarter, where celebration, passion, and entertainment reign. This is where you’d go for spring break, you know, if there wasn’t a huge wall around the entire place to keep citizens from other quarters from coming in.
Archia– the agricultural quarter that values simplicity and nature. They’re not even allowed electricity. UM WHAT.
Eonia– the futuristic quarter that values technology, stoicism and harmonious community. Buuut also nasty things like forced euthanasia and genetic experiments.

Travel between the quarters is severely limited or even impossible, and citizens are growing discontent with the lifestyle disparities. Not that I blame them. You gotta fight for your right to electricity, peasants.

A ruthless, thieving anti-heroine

Keralie is a thief, and a good one. One of the best, even. She’s been living in the seedy underbelly of Toria since she rebelled and ran away from her loving (but boring) parents at the age of 12, She mastered the pickpocket trade from childhood friend (and new black market crime lord) Mackiel. Keralie is happy living her best amoral life, until the day she steals and watches a memory chip that reveals that the four ruling queens have been murdered. Suddenly on the run, with information that people would literally killed for, she teams up with the messenger charged with delivering the chip, to find out who could be behind the shocking assassinations.

A Murder Mystery

It’s not a spoiler if it’s in the title, right? There are four very dead queens, and Keralie is the only one, other than the assassin, who has seen it happen. Together with Varin, the stoic, beautiful messenger she stole from (read: REQUISITE LOVE INTEREST), they must break into the castle and hope to solve the crime, PLUS not get arrested or killed themselves. But Keralie soon figures out that everything she knows is, you guessed it, a lie. No honor among thieves, and all that.