I bought Lee Battersby’s debut novel The Corpse-Rat King back in 2013, mostly because it had skeletal warriors on the cover. As a child raised on Ray Harryhausen movies, that was pretty much irresistible.

I totally missed the sequel, The Marching Dead, released in March 2013. I corrected that mistake last month, and settled in with the book last night. In this installment professional battlefield looters Marius dos Hellespont and his apprentice Gerd, together with Gerd’s not-dead-enough Granny, journey across the continent to solve the riddle of why the dead have stopped dying, and to return them to the afterlife where they belong. Both books were paperback originals from Angry Robot with covers by Nick Castle; here’s the publishing deets.

The Corpse-Rat King (416 pages, $7.99 paperback/$1.99 digital, August 28, 2012)
The Marching Dead (411 pages, $7.99 paperback/$2.99 digital, March 26, 2013)

Battersby’s most recent book is the YA fantasy Magrit, published last year by Walker Books. He’s also produced one collection, Through Soft Air (Prime Books, 2006).