Murder in the Temple

The Soar Chronicles, Book 1

By: Malory

Narrated by: Neil Hellegers

Welcome to Soar, where your Level, your Class, and your god decide how you live and how you die. Unless you’re Jana Lowe. Then you're all kinds of screwed.

When a High Priestess turns up dead in her own temple, the city does what it always does; shrugs and keeps moving. Corruption’s just part of the landscape, and dead holy women aren’t rare enough to make the betting books. But this particular corpse has Jana’s name written all over it, and for once, that might not be a bad thing.

Once, he had a Class, a patron god, and a future. Now? He’s broke, suspended, and, worst of all, fresh out of divine favour. Just a low-Level Private Investigator with limited Skills and a very punchable face.

To crack the case, Jana has to find a way to level up without a god’s blessing, dodge the wrong kind of attention, and wade through a city where faith is currency and murder’s just part of the market. And if he lives long enough to find the killer? Maybe—just maybe—he'll be allowed to get his job back.

He’s Classless. Broke. Out of luck. But murder in Soar? That’s his kind of trouble.

©2026 Malory (P)2025 Audible, Inc.

its a good start.

I'll get the next one. I don't usually leave reviews, but I did this time because it's a new book and worth the credit.

Unique and surprisingly good!

Niel being the narrator tipped the scales on my credit and I'm glad it did! This is a really unique take on litrpg and I enjoyed it very much. The pace of character development is well done and the detective motif is pretty unique in the genre. I enjoyed the story, the characters, they way the world/system is set up. And, of course, Neil was phenomenal!

A bold attempt at a litrpg detective mystery.

The worldbuilding is good and the characters memorable.

This is a world ruled by a system with classes and levels and skills. At core levels you get a class and whenever you level up you can choose between raw stats or skills. Skills are by far the better choice as some can be reality shattering. But there is a catch, all skills and classes come from gods, who live in the city our story takes place. It is thus to the best interest of basically everyone to keep the gods happy.

We follow Janna Lowe, a private investigator with a mysterious past that at some point left him classless. Lowe is as such, at the bottom of the barrel. Someone of substuncial power could sneeze his way and blow him up to bits. There is also the problem that killing anything in this world gives XP, so quite a few people are just looking for an excuse to go serial killer mode. Lowe thus has to rely to his wits and his many tricks up his sleeves.

I like this. Lowe is not your typical OP MC but he never feels weak through the story which can be summarized as follows:

The high priestess of the fire demon god is murdered in her chambers in her temple.

Lowe, an ex detective and now classless private investigator is brought into the case.

Lowe is assigned a temple guard and these 2 are our main characters. I loved his bodyguard. He is his own person with his own interests.

The story takes our 2 sherlock and watson inspired characters through this fantasy city trying to solve a mystery.
We get to see gods conspire, avatars of gods be dicks, powerful rich people with their own agendas, underground criminals, and all sorts of forces colide.

We also get to see the plot thicken with every step. Every answer raises new questions and all in all this is a well done mix of litrpg fantasy and mystery.

Now, some things im not a fan of:

The POV follows Lowe for 99% of the story but it switches to random people from time to time giving us an omniscient knowledge over Lowe. Id rather we stuck with him throughout.

The story becomes hard to follow at points. Theres a lot of interconnected mysteries and a lot of characters and its easy to lose track of the names and roles.

All in all a solid read and looking forward to the next one.

Possibly the worst “detective” I’ve ever seen.

If you’re looking for a murder mystery with an intelligent, complex, and witty detective then this isn’t the story for you. MC is very incompetent at his job, so much so that he doesn’t really do any compelling investigative work but instead just has things happen to him and around him that lead to the case finally being solved.