It wasn’t a promising introduction to a new planet: yanked from Earth, held captive and experimented on by a mad witch.

A mysterious stranger rides into a corrupt, violence-ridden town and proceeds to clean things up in his own no-holds-barred fashion. Set that in the Wild Wild West and you’ve got the plot of every spaghetti Western movie. Put it in a medieval fantasy world and you have Brutal, a novel very much in the tradition of pulp-era S&S classics like Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories and Clark Ashton Smith’s Hyperborean cycle.

Getting captured by the king can ruin your whole rebellion.

Quinn hadn’t even declared library science as her major yet, when she was pulled from her university library into the Magical Library of Everywhere.