Category: Review

Wildcat

  By

★★★½
“She’s got claws.”

I was quite startled to read some of the scathing reviews this received. For I genuinely enjoyed it, to the point it likely came one element (which I’ll get to) from a seal of approval. Sure, it’s nothing particularly new overall. However, I found it consistently enjoyable, to the level I felt no desire to look at my phone at any point. These days, that’s high praise indeed. It takes place in a slightly alternate London, where gang bosses Frasier Mahoney (Charles Dance) and Mrs. Christina Vine (Krige) are on the edge of a war for control of the city. There’s also a rogue element, in the Mushka Gang, who have turned an East End estate into a no-go area.

Ada (Beckinsale) doesn’t have much to do with this, until her brother Edward (Hardiker) gets deep in debt to Mahoney. He kidnaps her daughter to ensure the money gets paid back. This forces Ada to carry out a heist on a jewellery store run by Vine, which is only the start in a series of problems. She does have assistance, in the shape of former lover Roman (Tan), who can help fence the product. Meanwhile, Ada is trying to get Mahoney blamed for the robbery, to start an inter-factional war that can cover their escape. Meanwhile meanwhile, we discover Ada and Edward’s past, and encounter a number of colourful characters, such as the foul-mouthed Galloway (Tom Bennett, channeling Budget Nick Frost).

There are a lot of moving parts, but Nunn keeps things clear. He has plenty of action experience, including the wonderful Scott Adkins vehicle One Shot, which was my favourite movie of 2021. This isn’t quite as relentlessly kinetic, yet keeps a good pace throughout. Tan actually gets as many action scenes as Beckinsale, and this brings me to the issue mentioned above. While she still looks the part – and very good for 52 – there’s an awful lot of shots from behind, strongly suggesting heavy stunt doubling. And it’s not subtly done. They might as well just have hired Laura Vörtler, Beckinsale’s stunt double, to play the part and been done with it. Still, despite clearly more limited resources, I preferred this to her last couple of actioners, Canary Black and Jolt.

It helps to have the likes of Krige and Dance in the supporting cast. The latter is barely seen until the end, though makes up for lost time with a blistering anecdote about his late wife. I really enjoyed Krige, whose character can go from comforting a grandchild troubled by bad dreams, to torturing an employee for information, without more than a blink. There are some elements which feel underdeveloped, such as a weird club which seems little more than a flimsy excuse to tie Beckinsale up. But overall, I enjoyed this, and particularly appreciated the bone-dry British humour peppered throughout. Although the lead may not have many more action films in her, Nunn continues to prove his credentials. 

Dir: James Nunn
Star: Kate Beckinsale, Lewis Tan, Rasmus Hardiker, Alice Krige

Paradox Effect

  By

★★½
“Not much effect on me.”

I’m always down for an Olga Kurylenko film. She’s been in some good entries on the site previously, including Sentinelle and High Heat. Her track record gets her the benefit of the doubt, for an entry like this, which might be a bit marginal if it starred another actress. Though American, it takes place in Bari, Italy where recovering junkie Karina (Kurylenko) is putting her life back together, and looking forward to the arrival of her young daughter, Lucy (Astons).  However, on the way home from a late-night shift at the bakery where she works, she stumbles into a murder commited by mob courier Covek (Trevena), which becomes a car-chase, ending in a fiery crash.

The problem is, this  burned up the drugs Covek was supposed to be delivering to Silvio (Keitel). He “recruits” – quotes used advisedly – Karina to acquire a replacement stash, a process which drags them both through the Italian underworld over the course of the night. Matters are not helped by a couple of factors. Silvio has Covek’s son as a hostage, so noncompliance is not an option. Oh, and did I mention that Covek is actually an Interpol agent, who will go to any lengths to make sure Silvio faces justice? On the other side, Karina will go to any lengths to make sure her own daughter is not harmed. But the trail of destruction being left in the wake of her and Covek’s hunt for heroin is not exactly subtle. 

I wanted to like this more than I ended up doing. It feels as if Karina needs to be more central than she is. She ends up spending too much time either doing Covek’s bidding, or following him around, and that’s not what I wanted to see. Kurylenko > Trevena, except the film doesn’t seem to realize it.  Keitel, another actor I like, is also underused. To the point where, up until the very end, I half-wondered if he filmed all his scenes somewhere else, and was then spliced into the movie during the editing stage. That turns out not to be the case. But the mere fact it seems possible is another illustration of the wobbly execution. 

Even basic stuff like the film’s title, which is both strikingly generic and never explained, is maddening. Opening with a quote from Nietzche sets intellectual aspirations the rest of the movie isn’t able to sustain. I will say, it is technically decent: I appreciated little things, like them deciding to blow up a genuine car, rather than faking it with CGI. When given the chance, Kurylenko does well in the action, though quite why Karina has these skills is never explained. It would have been improved by being the film depicted in the poster (I must have missed Kurylenko’s pleather suit), simply having Karina trying to get the replacement drugs herself. In that scenario, Covek becomes surplus to the film’s requirements. A win-win, I’d say. 

Dir: Scott Weintrob
Star: Olga Kurylenko, Oliver Trevena, Harvey Keitel, Alice Astons

Compulsion

  By

★★★
“Rated R, for raunchy and rough.”

The “erotic thriller” now seems almost as quaint a part of cinema history as beach party films. It feels partly as if the Harvey Weinstein scandal made nudity and sexuality taboo in Hollywood. The rise of the Internet also provides easy access to all the naked flesh anyone could possibly want. Regardless of the cause, there are no longer big budget films like Basic Instinct or Wild Things being made, let alone being #6 at the North American box-office for the year, as Instinct managed [that said, United Artists paid $2 million for the reboot rights earlier this year. We’ll see; I’m not optimistic]. So in some ways, this feels like a throwback, drawing influence from Brian de Palma and Paul Verhoeven.

It’s the fourth, and supposedly final, collaboration between director Marshall and his wife/star Kirk. Two of the previous ones have been covered here, in The Lair and Duchess; I haven’t yet seen the other, witchcraft film The Reckoning. But there can’t be many directors who have worked so often with their spouses. Maybe Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich? The results for this couple have certainly fallen short of peak Marshall, such as The Descent, or even Doomsday, both commercially and critically. While this likely won’t change the narrative, I’m not averse to a nostalgic combo of gratuitous nudity and graphic violence. I’ll leave Mr. and Mrs. Marshall to figure out what it means for the relationship, in their couples’ therapy sessions. 

It takes place in Malta where a shapely cat-suit clad serial killer is committing some particularly brutal murders. Investigating the case is local detective Claudia Cavara (Gorietti), with the two main suspects Diana (Kirk), a bisexual thief with a hot boyfriend (McGowan), and her lesbian neighbour, Evie (Sieklucka). Will there be steamy trysts, voyeurism, and a Euro-pudding of accents, from Poland to Yorkshire? Yes, of course! Sieklucka was in those 365 Days films on Netflix, after all. You will also experience what may well be the stabbiest scene in film history, making Psycho look like a Sunday School play. While I felt the victim was certainly deserving (I hated his hair), it showed Marshall has clearly taken influence from Italian giallo films, with their masked killers and hyperviolence. 

It is, however, nowhere near as good as Basic Instinct. Kirk isn’t fit to hold Sharon Stone’s ice-pick, and the whole police side of things is embarrassingly half-baked. It also feels as if Marshall was more into the violence than the sex, and there was a point, probably about two-thirds in, where I realized I didn’t particularly care about anyone. The decision to make it a whodunnit backfires too, because there are an extremely limited number of possible suspects. The end result is therefore quite a mess, and I can understand the critical disdain. However, it’s a mess which had its moments, and was definitely among the most R-rated of movies I saw this year. More of those will always be welcome. 

Dir: Neil Marshall
Star: Charlotte Kirk, Anna-Maria Sieklucka, Zach McGowan, Giulia Gorietti

Sheriff Bride: Dan’s Story, by Cheryl Williford

  By

Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆

Despite the fact that all of the books of this series are written by different authors, they exhibit a lot of similarity in style, and also in literary quality. Since the quality tends to be wanting, that’s not a good thing. (My wife Barb really likes these books, which is why we read them together; and even I find the premise novel and intriguing. But it suffers from mediocre and even amateurish execution.) However, Williford has a bit smoother, less pronoun-averse and a trifle more textured prose style than her colleagues, and also a more realistic and less “vegetarian” approach to the realities of lethal force in law enforcement than the first two books displayed. There are situations that can arise where killing a determined aggressor is the only way to protect innocent lives; and she recognizes both the fact that a decent person doesn’t want to do that and may be severely torn up by the pain of doing it, and that neither the reluctance nor the pain change the moral necessity of doing it at times. In fairness to the author of the first book, Teresa Ives Lilly, her heroine realized this as well, but was able to make a decision to disable rather than kill in the particular case she had to confront. But circumstances may not always provide that option…

How much time has elapsed since the previous book isn’t explicitly stated at the outset; but there, the oldest Hardin sister Sam was newly pregnant and here she’s full term, so we can infer about nine months. Here, the focus is on the third-oldest of the quartet, Dan, who’s the sole viewpoint character – though, as always in the series, narration is in third person. Mutual attraction between her and circuit-riding preacher Joshua Plain was already established in the first book, so the romantic focus in this one is predictable, to the readers, the Waterhole townsfolk, and Dan’s sisters; she’s the only one with doubts about it, centering on whether or not her affection is returned, and on whether she’s cut out to be a preacher’s wife. The short length of the book keeps the angst over this from getting too repetitive and wearing.

There’s no single overall conflict here, so even with just 104 pages the plot has an episodic quality; attention passes from Dan’s venture of opening a café on the side, to allow scope for her cooking talents (Joshua, with 19th-century prejudice against women in business, is very opposed to the idea –though he’s had to admit that she and her sisters are very qualified peace officers!– and to her credit she sticks to the idea anyway), to Sam’s pregnancy and delivery, to the problem of a couple of newly-arrived underage saloon girls, and to the conflict with a tyrannical local rancher. And sometimes we shift back and forth among these. Williford doesn’t really develop the latter character enough to make his motives, and his drastic escalation of the conflict, really credible. On the other hand, the character of young Native American woman (and Christian convert) Morning Glory gets to shine here. Though I’m still not buying the secondary romantic thread provided for her! The role of prayer and Christian faith in God’s guidance in the main characters’ lives is treated positively, and I appreciated the point that combative fighting over Bible interpretation doesn’t please God. The Apostle Paul would agree!

There are a number of editorial issues here that simple proofreading and minimal attention to detail would have corrected, and that frequently took me out of the story. The rancher’s last name changes unaccountably from Dunner to Norton, and then to Newton, in different parts of the book, and sometimes between paragraphs. (Rolls eyes.) We’re told at one point that a circuit judge will arrive tomorrow; but that doesn’t happen, and a prisoner remains in jail with no realistic follow-up. Then near the end, a “district judge” from Dallas makes a quick appearance in response to a telegram. Dallas is in eastern, not western, Texas, and it’s not likely that Waterhole would have been in the same judicial district. We learn here that Morning Glory’s grandmother was of the Comanche tribe, kidnapped and raped by an Apache, among whose people Morning Glory and her mother were raised. But it was said in the second book that she was from Wisconsin, which is quite far north and east from the Apache homeland. There are several other clashing details, that show poor attention to the writing craft. Despite all of these issues, I do like the Hardin sisters as characters; I just regret that they weren’t blessed with more competent chroniclers!

Author: Cheryl Williford
Publisher: Lovely Christian Romance, available from Amazon, as a printed book or for Kindle.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Killing Mary Sue

  By

★½
“Death becomes her.”

Is there anything worse than a comedy which doesn’t land? I get that humour is subjective, but this action-comedy manages to be spectacularly unfunny, to a degree I have to wonder how it got made. There are some well-known people in the cast: actors who I know have talent (to the list below, you can add Martin Kove and Jake Busey), and whose work I have previously enjoyed. What did they see in the script here, which made them think, “Yes, this is something I want to do”? For this is the cinematic equivalent of nails being dragged across a chalkboard for an hour and a half. You don’t watch this, so much as endure it.  

To be fair, I think the characters being so repellent is a conscious, deliberate choice. You have sleazy politician Bradley Weiner (Mulroney), and his problematic step-daughter, Mary Sue (McCormick). She’s an utter brat, with no interest in anything except partying hard. With a key election looming, and Weiner trailing in the polls, he and his campaign adviser (Busey) decide to bump Mary Sue off, both to end her scandals, and for a sympathy bump in the polls. However, she proves remarkably hard to terminate: there is eventually an explanation for this, though it’s more of the “Wait a minute…” variety, than anything convincing. Still, Mary Sue’s survival forces her father to up the ante, and repeatedly send nastier assassins to try and finish the job. 

The first chunk of this is energetically devoted to demonstrating how terrible everyone is. The problem might be, it’s too damn successful. They never recover: for Weiner, it’s fair enough, since he is the nominal “bad guy.” But for Mary Sue, this is a problem, since you want your heroine to have some redeeming qualities. I genuinely couldn’t find any. Indeed, I was beginning to sympathize with her father, since in her position, putting her down like the mad dog she is, feels almost like responsible parenting. [Our teenage daughter wasn’t exactly a saint; yet she’s Mother freakin’ Teresa beside Mary Sue] This is all lazily blamed on daddy issues, her biological father being murdered in front of her, when he was robbing a convenience store. 

The concept of her being a real-life Mary Sue is potentially amusing, except that’s as far as it goes. Simply repeating a cliché of bad writing, doesn’t stop it from being a cliché, and writer-director Sunshine does nothing more. Have her slowly and gracelessly roll away from a hail of bullets, or mentioning video-game auto-aiming capabilities, simply isn’t enough. Especially when Mary Sue shows no sign of a character arc, and remains resolutely unlikable until her sudden, thoroughly unconvincing and revelatory change at the end. Sort of. I’m not even going to get into the lumpen and turgid whacks at unsubtle political satire: guys, the Russian are interfering in ‘Merican politics! If you find that intrinsically amusing, you know where to find this film. 

Dir: James Sunshine
Star: Sierra McCormick, Dermot Mulroney, Sean Patrick Flanery, Jason Mewes

Undercover

  By

★★★½
“The long game.”

It’s surprising to me that there are currently no English-language external reviews listed for this on the IMDb. It’s certainly worthy of notice outside its native Spain, where it was nominated for thirteen Goyas, the local equivalent of the Oscars, winning Best Film and Best Actress. It takes place over a number of years around the turn of the millennium, when the Spanish state was in a notorious and bloody war against ETA, a terrorist group fighting for the independence of the Basque region. Mónica (Yuste) is a cop who is recruited by Angel (Tosar) to go deep undercover, and infiltrate ETA in order to provide information on the group, its members and their plans.

This takes a very long time, the group understandably being suspicious of outsiders and extremely cautious about in whom they put their faith. We dip into the life of “Arantxa”, the new identity of Mónica, as she becomes active in the separatist movement, laying the groundwork to be seen as reliable and, more importantly, trustworthy. It takes six years before she is finally allowed entrance and given a mission of note: providing shelter for Kepa (Gastesi), an ETA member on the run. Having gained his confidence, she is then brought in to a bigger plan, bringing leader Sergio (Anido) back into Spain, and restablishing an ETA cell in San Sebastian, to attack judges, police and other targets. 

There isn’t anything particularly new here. You can probably tick off the story elements as they show up, if you’ve seen any other “undercover cop” thrillers along the same lines. It’s basically a series of narrow escapes in which Arantxa’s true identity is almost discovered. Sergio finds the phone she uses to talk to Angel, for example, or she is almost unable to return a folder after she passed it to the cops for copying. She starts to have feelings for Kepa too, while Angel faces resistance to the operation from the highers-up. Oh, and #Sexism, because it’s Spain. All fairly boilerplate stuff. However, the secret sauce is in the execution, which Echevarría does with no shortage of skill, particularly when it comes to dialling up the tension.

It is based on a true story, though to what extent it’s accurate, I can’t say. Here, not knowing the eventual outcome going in, except at the highest level (I was aware that ETA ended up disbanding) is likely a help. Because you won’t know whether or not Mónica completes her mission successfully – and, a different question, makes it out alive. I did appreciate there’s not much effort at moral grey here. Sometimes a terrorist is just a bad guy, and if you have any doubts about Sergio, his treatment of Monica’s cat will dissolve those [If they do not, we really can’t be friends!] Again, it’s not the subtlest of plotting. Yet between it and Echevarria’s skilled hand, it all undeniably gets the job done.

Dir: Arantxa Echevarría
Star: Carolina Yuste, Luis Tosar, Iñigo Gastesi, Diego Anido
a.k.a. La Infiltrada

Thicha

  By

★★★½
“…dig two graves, Thai style”

As a child, Oo-yi came to Thailand with her mother as a migrant worker. They had the misfortune to work for the cruel Madam Bussara (Kingpayome), who had a particularly nasty habit of pimping out young girls to her lawyer, Methi. When she tried to do the same to Oo-yi, Mom stood up for her – and was beaten to death for her pains. Oo-yi was able to escape, and raised by Ni Wai (Sirikul). Now, an adult (Luevisadpaibul), she is set on vengeance, and intent on destroying Madam Bussara’s life. To do so, she becomes Thicha, “accidentally” bumps into Bussara’s son, Phatchai (Chirathivat), and begins cultivating a relationship with him. But that’s the story of revenge: it’s messy. Since her feelings for him start becoming genuine.

On the one hand, it might seem rather soapy, and I won’t deny the melodramatic nature of things. But it is held together by a pair of great performances from Luevisadpaibul and Kingpayome. The latter, in particular, is close to an all-time villain. I’m not sure what happened to her husband, but it probably wasn’t good. Witness this monologue: “No one understands just how thrilling it is to watch a living being fight for its life. When it’s someone who always thought they were invincible, it’s even more entertaining. And if that desperate fight for survival is caused by my own hands? It’s almost as good as an orgasm.” Yeah: not somebody you want to mess with.

When her son shows up with Thicha, she knows instinctively that something is not right with his new girlfriend. From there, through the eight x 45-minute episodes, unfolds a slew of twists, revelations, nastiness and questions. Thicha is pregnant! Or is she? Phatchai discovers her deceptions! What will he do? Thicha’s informant inside Bussara’s house is exposed! How will she survive? It all builds to a rather brutal battle between Thicha and Madam, on the very spot where her mother was buried, years before. I was about to apply a demerit for Thicha having to be rescued by Phatchai there, until… Well, it doesn’t end exactly like that, this being a case where the pursuit of vengeance is not a rewarding and cathartic experience.

It is a little distancing. While Madam is a right c… not very nice person, it’s perhaps Methi who is in direst need of drastic punitive action. I feel it would have been more satisfying if he had been the bad guy from the start, rather than a peripheral villain. However, there’s a good sense of escalation, with each episode ending at a point which lures you forward into the next installment. It’s the scenes where Thicha and Bussara face off – be that verbally or (eventually) physically – where the series comes to life, and I found myself holding my breath more than once. If it does take a while to reach the final payoff, I’d be hard pushed to call it unsatisfactory.

Dir: Ekkasit Trakulkasemsuk
Star: Pimchanok Luevisadpaibul, Metinee Kingpayome, Pachara Chirathivat, Penpak Sirikul

The Last Exit

  By


★★★★
“Manson family values.”

Genuinely good Tubi Original shocker! Well, that’s a bit harsh: there have have been decent ones before – such as Lowlifes, which certainly has some DNA in common. But this is likely the best I’ve yet seen, anchored by an excellent performance from Richardson. This takes place on a dark and stormy night, in a remote Scottish farmhouse. Rose (Richardson) is taking care of her disabled husband, with the help of daughter Maisy (Soverall), where there’s a frantic knocking at the door. It’s two men, Matty (Cadby) and his badly injured brother, Jack (Linpow). Their car got into a wreck nearby, and they are in desperate need of help. Naturally, they aren’t innocent passers-by. 

No great surprise there, and it turns out they are fleeing from a robbery, with the intention of getting across the North Sea to Norway. However, there was a third member of the gang, who didn’t survive. He’s the son of the man who planned the heist: for obvious reasons is not happy about the situation, and ends up heading for the farm. However, that is not the biggest problem Matty and Jack face. For it turns out they aren’t the only ones keeping secrets, and they have just chosen the wrongest possible home to invade. Told you it was not dissimilar to Lowlifes.  The question of who are the villains here becomes a good deal less clear, the more we know about everyone involved.

To that end, much credit to the script, also written by Linpow in an impressive feature debut. It reveals the necessary information at the right pace, and just when you think you know what’s going on, it’ll throw another twist at you. Loyalties shift from scene to scene as the characters discover more about each other, or themselves, and the situation becomes inextricably messy. You know it’s going to end in messy violence, and the film certainly doesn’t disappoint there. The cast are all solid – though in the credits, I notice the production had a “sensitivity consultant”, which is apparently a thing now. I’d like to offer my services as a crass insensitivity consultant to any movies interested. My qualifications there speak for themselves.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. It is, however, Richardson’s movie, having the toughest arc to handle as she moves from caring and compassionate mother to… Well, I guess technically she is still a caring and compassionate mother. It’s just that, well… /gestures vaguely at the screen. The film opens and closes with meaningful quotes about motherhood and the emotions it can trigger. Although what transpires between them, makes them read in radically different ways. To that end, I was getting notes of French horror flick Inside, another story of maternal instincts gone horribly wrong, or Matriarch, also set in Scotland with visitors getting more than they bargained for. Yet despite the influences, this is its own creature, powered by Richardson, and is a solid thriller to the very last shot.

Dir: Matthias Hoene
Star: Joely Richardson, Neil Linpow, Sadie Soverall, Harry Cadby
a.k.a. Little Bone Lodge
[A version of this review originally appeared on Film Blitz]

The Phantom Warrior

  By

★½
“That’s the thing about revenge. It’s messy.”

And, unfortunately, in this case, it’s not messy in a good or even interesting way. It’s messy in a “What the heck is going on?” way, with a large side-order of, “Can somebody please explain this to me?”, and a garnish of “Anyone? Hello?”. To say this film poses more questions than answers would be incorrect. Because that would wrongly imply it offers any answers at all. I’m just glad the version I saw ran a mere 84 minutes, because the IMDb cites a running time more than half an hour longer. Maybe the thirty-five minutes removed for this cut were all of the explanation. Though I suggest it’d be improved by removing about the same again.

From what I could figure out, it’s about a vigilante with the faintly ludicrous name of Nemesis Knight, played by Bartlett who is sporting an even more flaky rural American accent. She seems to make a pact with the devil (Berkoff), which gives her certain abilities. However, this also puts her on the radar of a support group of like-minded individuals, who want her to join them, and the local sheriff (Cain), following the trail of dead bodies left in Nemesis’s wake. There’s also a guy called Dollos (Rowen), with a harem of both sexes, and a vested interest in proceedings, because… Well, like so much else here, it’s unclear, which makes it difficult to give a damn.

This is a first, but I mist give credit to casting director Helen Stafford, for pulling in a top tier cast of B-movie names. In addition to Cain and Berkoff, there is also Marina Sirtia, Vas Blackwood and a bloke off the British version of Gladiators. Most of whom are featured higher up the IMDb page than their role in the film would demand, though that’s par for the course in the low-budget realm. It’s basically the script, also by director Michael, which is easily the biggest problem here. I knew we were probably in trouble, when we don’t get any dialogue at the start, just a leaden lump of voice-over from Ms. Knight. This is always a red flag, and in this case, proved an accurate warning of story problems to come. 

Basically, it’s almost impossible to care. It’s clear that the heroine is taking out bad people, but these are drawn in such a facile way, the resulting revenge has no impact at all. It builds to an invasion by the vigilante group of what seems to be a gangster dinner party, where everybody is doing their best Goodfellas impressions. These are about as good as my Goodfellas impression. You’re left to ponder why the whole production is set in a poorly-rendered simulation of the United States, adding unnecessary complexity e.g. finding cars with left-hand drive, to a production which doesn’t have the resources for it. A couple of bits of half-decent imagery – Bartlett looks okay, providing she keeps her mouth shut – are far from sufficient.

Dir: Savvas D. Michael
Star: Nicole Bartlett, Elijah Rowen, Dean Cain, Stephen Berkoff

Calixta: The Vanquishers of Alhambra, by Omayra Vélez

  By

Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆

Subtitled “A grimdark fantasy,” if you are expecting this to be packed full of sex and violence, as a result… Well, you might be a little disappointed. While the lead character, Calixta Harlow Carlyle, is an “Exotic” – a highly-trained prostitute – she doesn’t seem to do all that much… um, prostiuting. We’re about half-way through before she goes to bed with anyone. The violence isn’t particularly brutal or copious either. It is, I guess, somewhat dark, and certainly not a young adult book. But anyone who watched (or read) Game of Thrones will not exactly require the services of a fainting couch to get through this.

Calixta ends up dying, trying to protect one of the girls in the brothel she runs. However, that’s just the start, because the powers that be in the afterlife inform our heroine she’s actually a Vanqusher. These are people with magical talents who act as guardians against the forces of evil, currently massing as they prepare to take over the world. Vanquishers are supposed to have guides from birth, who train them. But Calixta never had that benefit, instead being sold into slavery and trained as an Exotic. She’s sent back to life – much to the shock of her employees – and told to find the other three Vanquishers. But the evil Jadro wants to ensure Calixtra dies permanently, before she can come into her true abilities, and stand against him.

She’s forced into going on the run, with three friends who are even less suited to survival. This involves an escape through the sewers which is about the nastiest sequence in the book (straying uncomfortably close to fetish for my tastes), although they are then rescued by Dreyden, another Vanquisher. Together, they go on a quest to awaken another of their kind, Calixta learning how to control the battle-mage skills she has been given, which allow her to summon and manipulate the element of fire, both offensively and for protection. This talent is very much a work in progress, hence the lower score for action – Dreyden likely does more of the heavy lifting in that department. I suspect she may improve in future installments.

There are several points where the writing does come off as somewhat clunky, and points at which it feels like characters are saying things which are more needed for the plot than anything else. It did also feel that things were unfolding at a leisurely pace: this is approaching four hundred page long, and by the end, we’re not particularly far on from where we were. There’s a lot of travel. However, it is an interesting pantheon, with virtues like Justice, Wisdom and Hope taking human form under a deity they call “Father”. It has occasional moments of genuine emotion too, such as in regard to Calixta’s unborn child, which proved surprisingly poignant. I suspect it’ll end up being fairly straightforward good vs. evil, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Author: Omayra Vélez
Publisher: Self-published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 4 in the Vanquishers of Alhambra series.