A Practical Guide to Evil I cover art

A Practical Guide to Evil I

A Practical Guide to Evil, Book 1

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A Practical Guide to Evil I

By: David Verburg
Narrated by: Amber Dekkers
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About this listen

The Empire stands triumphant.

For twenty years, the Dread Empress has ruled over the lands that were once the Kingdom of Callow, but behind the scenes of this golden age, threats to the empire are rising.

The nobles of the Wasteland weave their plots behind pleasant smiles while rebellion stirs beyond Peren Woods, for dreams of crowns were buried in shallow graves. The greatest danger of all lies to the west, where the First Prince of Procer restored order at last: her people sundered, she ponders if a crusade might not be the way to secure her reign.

Yet none of this matters, for in the heart of the conquered lands, the most dangerous man alive sat across an orphan girl and offered her a knife.

Her name is Catherine Foundling, and she has a plan.

©2025 David Verburg (P)2025 Dreamscape Lore Dark Fantasy Epic Fantasy Military Royalty

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All stars
Most relevant
Given my praise, here is my sole criticism of note: performer makes a few odd mistakes. Cavalry is not Calvary, for instance.

Very cool story, well performed

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Practically in Love with PGtE, one of my Favourite web novels, gets a full novel edit treatment.

Practically in Love with PGtE, one of my Favourite

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After waiting for years to see the finished, edited and polished version of this tale come out I can say it was all worth it.

Great prose, awesome characters and a much deeper feeling world after the editing pass. Can't wait for future installments.

Its finally here and its awesome.

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The new parts of the story made the introduction to the guide way better, a lot more of the personalities match the later books. i am glad to say the humor stays on point the whole way through.
A bit sad some of the names er new as i liked the old ones but it is a minor change, so it doesn't detract from the story.
Can't wait for the next books

The rewrite did wonders to the opening of the story

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I can't really criticise the later portions of a book without risking spoilers, so beware. I'll try to be vague so that I don’t spoil things too much.

The majority of the book is good. As the title suggests, the protagonist is trying to join the bad guys and work her way up through their ranks. She manages the first part fairly quickly, then spends most of the book training with them and occasionally doing evil stuff. At one point a character wants to kill some innocent people but she's able to bribe him not to. Then later that character wants to kill some more innocent people and she doesn't have anything left to bribe him with, so he kills them. And for some reason this traumatises her. It's all the more jarring because throughout the book she's been thinking of the good guys as naive idiots for trying to beat the bad guys rather than joining them. Then she goes and freaks out over bad guys killing people.

Like, what? It's super weird. It's not even like they pulled the wool over her eyes or anything, at no point did any of them pretend to be a good person, yet she spent the whole book grandually befriending them anyway, only to throw all that away because a bad person did something bad.

I might still buy the second book when it releases, to see if things improve later, but I'm not sure at this point, hence the 3-star rating.

Mostly Good, Weird Twist

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