Literary rating: ★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½
Seventeen-year-old Sarah Fairchild and her family have become persona non grata after her father’s execution by the Algardis Empire. He was a renowned fighter and commander, so his alleged desertion makes no sense to Sarah. Regardless, his wife and daughter are now pariahs to the local community. Even with Sarah’s unparalleled fighting skills, both natural and magical, her employment opportunities are limited, to say the least.
Which is how she ends up acting as the guard at a warehouse full of shady artifacts, owned by the even shadier Cormar. There, she meets the scholarly Ezekiel Crane, who helps Sarah as she begins to search for the truth about her father’s fate – facts which someone is keen to cover-up, at savage cost to our heroine. Finding out what happened requires her to join the Mercenaries’ Guild, and head with them into the teeth of a ferocious battle being waged by Algardis against a rebel group, led by eight high-powered mages.
I suspect the problems here are mostly related to reading this as a one-off. For example, the entire first half of the book, with Sarah working for Cormar, serves absolutely no purpose except to introduce her to Ezekiel. Now, I’m thinking it’s quite likely there is a payoff further into the series, with the artifacts he collects eventually proving to be useful in the battle against the mages. But for the purpose of this book, it’s a complete dead-end. If a story is going to be crippled in this way by dividing it into four parts, maybe it shouldn’t be divided into four parts? It certainly does nothing to encourage me to pick up the three subsequent volumes.
When Sarah enlists, in order to find the man she believes holds the key to her father’s death, it does improve. There’s a nice dynamic at play between her abilities, which are almost at the superhero level, and her need to remain below the radar. I was impressed by the final battle, though it’s less a battle, than a rout, with the enemy wizards using the magical equivalent of drone strikes against the mercenaries. And I also liked the “sun mage” Sarah encounters: she is basically the occult equivalent of a nuclear weapon, and may be even more bad-ass.
At the end though, I was left unsatisfied. I appreciate it’s a difficult balancing act, when you offer a cheap introduction to a series, because you need to lure people in to buy the next part. Although not alone in this, Edun doesn’t apparently realize that the best way to accomplish this is simply to give the reader the best book you can. Baiting them with set-ups left unrealized and a story that just ends, rather than coming to a natural finish, is more likely to lead to a sense of unfulfilled dissatisfaction. And that’s no way to get anyone to fork over more money.
Author: Terah Edun
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 4 in the Crown Service series.