The Jackal of Carthage (Book #1): A Dark Historical Fantasy Harem Adventure - Grimdark (AB)

He had one rule. 

Never drink what you didn't pour. 

She ended it in one night.

---

Kadmar knows. He has run the numbers twice.

Five women will choose him along the way — a Gallic shield-maiden, a Balearic slinger, a Numidian rider, a priestess of the moon, and the daughter of the man he cannot conquer. Every one of them knows exactly what he is. They keep choosing him anyway. Whatever else burns, that doesn't.

-- The World You Will Enter --

Carthage hired ten thousand mercenaries to win its war, then decided their wages were optional. Kadmar — foundling, captain, nobody — is the only man in the garden sober enough to work out what that decision is going to cost. Then a wine-steward named Spendius picks him out of ten thousand drunks and tells him three true things about himself, and sells him nothing, and that is the whole seduction.

It is the debt that will kill them both.

What follows is the Truceless War: three years of the ugliest fighting the ancient world ever saw, waged by an army with no nation behind it and nothing to collect on but an unpaid invoice.

Kadmar will unite twelve nations that hate each other. He will steal a goddess out of her own temple. And he will learn that the only way to win this war is to stop fighting it like a soldier.

The war is real, the price is real, and the man at the centre of it is not the same man on the last page. If you want a hero who stays clean, this is not your book.

Every person and every thing in Carthage has a price. And someone always collects.

A grimdark harem adventure. Explicit, brutal. This is Book One of The Carthage Cycle.

Book Two, THE KNIFE OF CARTHAGE, releases 26 September 2026.