Tag: fantasy

The Steel Queen, by Karen Azinger

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

“In this world, you are nobody unless you can wield a sword, and I will not be nobody! My life will count for something!”

Another one in the ongoing series of “books I read because of the interesting-looking cover,” I suspect I may have lucked out here. Most of the other six volumes in the series possess rather more generic fantasy covers, and I’d likely have browsed past them. That would have been a shame, because I’d have missed out on a well-written story that combines many threads, and has three… two… dammit, 2½ heroines worthy of our site’s interest.

It takes place in the land of Erdhe, across in particular the kingdoms of Castlegard, Navarre, Lanverness and Coronth. Magic exists, but fell into disrepute centuries ago, after the War of Wizards, and things are roughly around the early middle ages, technology wise. At the highest level, it’s a straightforward “good vs. evil” tale, with the forces of the Lords of Light facing the Dark Lord and his minions. But the story proceeds, mostly around the various royal courts and their interactions.

To our end, the two most interesting characters are Princess Katherine of Castlegard, and Queen Liandra Tandroth of Lanverness. The former is the youngest child of the monarch, coming after five sons, and has absolutely no interest in being the demure, marriage token her father wants. She gets secret sword lessons from one of his knights, and after the King sends her off to Lanverness, in the hopes of her becoming more ladylike, fate (and the Lords of Light) intervene. It becomes increasingly clear Kath will play a significant role in the upcoming conflict against the Dark Lord, especially after his minions abduct her on the way to Lanverness, and she has to fend for herself and try to escape.

I thought Queen Liandra might be the monarch of the title, but her nickname is the Spider Queen, for her astute political instincts. She was the king’s sole heir, and was only allowed to assume the throne if she got married. Her husband died in a hunting accident – very Game of Thrones! –  and she has ruled ever since, using her unsurpassed wits and guile. While we’re on GoT, imagine a kinder, gentler version of Cersei Lannister, without the incest, and you’re in the right area. She has managed to out-think her opponents so far, but a conspiracy is under way to remove Liandra and put her dissolute (and easily manipulated) second son on the throne instead.

There’s also Princess Jordan of Navarre, one of seven siblings, who is as martially-inclined as Katherine; the two become ‘sword sisters’ after meeting in the Lanverness court. She’s the ½: for spoilerish reasons, I suspect she may be somewhat peripheral, shall we say, to the saga as a whole. These are the main players of relevance; it’s not all action heroines, by any means, and that’s perhaps Azinger’s main talent. She’s great at telling a story that has a lot of moving parts, in a way which keeps things clear in the reader’s head and builds well-defined characters, that engaged and interested me – even the villains. 

I get the feeling she is perhaps trying to draw parallels between events here and contemporary social politics. The Flame God who has taken over Coronth is brutal fundamentalist religion at its worst and most corrupt. However, the book originally came out in 2011, so it’s not necessarily quite clear now what those parallels are. It’s also far from a complete story: as you’d expect from the opening volume in a seven-book saga, things are only just beginning to get going by the end here. Yet, I was still reeled in, and if I didn’t already have a “to read” pile the size of a small mountain, would likely head straight into the next part. That, however, will likely have to wait until I retire from doing book reviews for the site…

Author: Karen Azinger
Publisher: Kiralynn Epics, available through Amazon both as an e-book and paperback.
Book 1 of 7 in The Silk & Steel Saga series

Venom in the Skin, by Jessica Gunn

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Literary rating: ★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

To be fair, the low rating here is not necessarily just the author’s fault. It was only almost at the end – when I was checking to see how much more I had to endure – that I discovered a salient fact. While this is described as being “Book 1” in the series, it appears to be a follow-up to the same writer’s five-volume Hunter Circles series. The heroine there, Krystin Blackwood, turns up in a cameo here, as do other characters, and it’s quite possible this would make more sense if you’d read that series. However: if you call your novel “Book 1”, it should be capable of standing on its own merits. Otherwise, call it “Book 6,” dammit.

As is, for a rookie reader, the does a really poor job of world building, presuming far too much of the background as known, and setting up situations where the reader is left entirely in the dark about who is doing what to whom, and why. The heroine is Ava Locke, who was previously part of a team of demon hunters, involved in a secret war between the forces of light and darkness. Save Ava, all her team were wiped out by Veynix, one of the enemy demons. She goes into her side’s version of witness protection, yet ends up the masked champion at an underground fight ring which pits demons against humans. That is, until her identity is exposed, and it turns out Veynix (and his collection of venomous poisons) is on her trail again. And the authorities behind Ava don’t exactly have her back.

For this novice reader, it was a real struggle, and if I didn’t feel like I had to write a review, this would likely have been a DNF (did not finish). The first half in particular, felt like really lazy writing, elements being dropped in without explanation. Even after I got to the end, and saw the semi-helpful chart at the back, I’m still not sure what a Hunter Circle is supposed to be or do. And is there magic – sorry, magik – or not? Seems most people can teleport at will, but other magic is… vague. [I have no clue about the significance of Ember witch magik] Some have it, others don’t. And a central character uses it once, then conveniently “forgets” they have it for the rest of the book – until it becomes necessary to the plot at the end. If I’d been reading a physical copy of this, and not an e-book, such a convenient contrivance would likely have led to it sailing across the room at that point.

There is a fair amount of action, from Ava’s fight-club contests, building to a battle against Veynix in his lair, and these are hard-hitting encounters. I just didn’t care about them or or the outcome, since I had no investment in either the participants or the world they inhabited. #RemoveFromDevice

Author: Jessica Gunn
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon both for Kindle and as a paperback.
Book 1 of 2 in the Deadly Trades series.

Slave, Warrior, Queen, by Morgan Rice

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

The author  is certainly prolific: this series, Of Crowns and Glory is eight books, yet only her third-longest, not even half the length of The Sorceror’s Ring. Unfortunately, based on this, what she delivers in volume, is negated by the low quality. The first problem is the setting, which is a lazy version of ancient Rome, right down to a population kept in thrall by gladiatorial games. Except, it’s actually “Delos”, which seems a convenient way for the author to avoid having to do any research; she can then make up whatever she wants, since it’s not a “real” place. You certainly don’t get much sense of it being a world into which much thought has been put.

The heroine is 17-year-old Ceres, whose father is a weapon-smith to the monarchy, though this brings in barely enough money for the family to survive. When he has to go off to try and earn his fortune, Ceres is on thin ice, because her mother tries to sell her. She runs away, and gets a job in the palace, becoming the “squire” (for want of a better word) to Prince Thanos, the only member of the ruling class who is not a scumbag, and is as handsome as he is moral. [Insert eye-rolling here. Just once, I’d like to read about a character who was smart, kind and ugly…] Elsewhere, Ceres’s brother and boyfriend have taken up arms as part of a rebellion against cruel King Claudius.

You can probably figure out where the rest of this goes, with Thanos having a jealous fiancée, while Ceres bounces in and out of dungeons, and has unexplained magical powers that manifest only when necessary to the plot. The last is a particular annoyance, not least because her upbringing has led Ceres to be not exactly short of combat skills herself, in defiance of society’s mores. This aspect is sadly underdeveloped, and she spends more time moping in cells than putting her skills to use. Although the cliff-hanger ending, with Ceres thrown into the gladiatorial arena as a political pawn, suggests more might perhaps be made of this in ensuing volumes. And is it wrong of me to mention that she never even touches a bow, as the cover depicts? On further investigation, it’s a stock photo, used by at least one other novel…

The plot and characters might also have been bought off-the-shelf, since they are hardly any less generic. The simplistic politics on view are particularly irritating, with noble peasants being relentlessly oppressed by their cruel overlords (Thanos excepted). The story keeps cutting back and forth between the palace intrigue and the rebellion, and the two sides never manage to mesh: the latter seems more an annoying distraction than anything. Rice does deserve credit for killing off some unexpected characters, which provides some sense of peril. But the ratio of title present here is about 80% slave to 20% warrior, with queen present only at trace, “produced in a facility which processes peanuts” levels.

Author: Morgan Rice
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon as an e-book or paperback.
Book 1 of 8 in the Of Crowns and Glory series.

The Last Dragonslayer

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★★★½
“Here be dragons. Well, a dragon, anyway…”

This slice of British televisual fantasy was offered up on Christmas Day, and provides a pleasant, warm and unchallenging slice of family fare. It takes place in a world where magic has ruled, but is gradually fading from consciousness and being replaced by technology. The magic appears connected to the dragons with which humanity shared the planet, uneasily. After previous battles, a kind of apartheid was set up, with the world divided into dragon and human areas. Overseeing the peace is the Dragonslayer, who is charged with killing any dragons who violate the treaty and attack humans or their territory. But some members of mankind are casting envious eyes on the unspoiled territory of the dragons, and would love an excuse to take it over.

Into this comes Jennifer Strange (Chappell), an orphan who was adopted as an apprentice by the magician Zambini (Buchan). A decade or so later, he vanishes suddenly, and while Jennifer is still coming to terms with that, a bigger shock occurs. Fate has decreed she is to become the Dragonslayer, the one prophesied to kill the final dragon. Having grown to love magic in all its forms, she’s extremely reluctant to do so. But how is a teenage girl supposed to escape what the apparently immutable finger of fate has written? And never mind, having to cope with all the other unwanted attention, from interview requests to merchandising deals, that comes to Jennifer along with the unexpected position.

It’s a nicely constructed alternate world, part steampunk, part modern and a declining part magical – wizards, for example, are now reduced to doing rewiring work for employment, such is the low demand for their skills. This offers scope for satirical elements, such as the Dragonslayer having to do adverts for a soft drink to pay off an unexpected tax debt. There are also any number of faces you’ll recognize if you watch much British TV: Buchan is familiar from Broadchurch; Bradley, who plays Jennifer’s sidekick Gordon, is best-known as Jon Snow’s wingman Samwell Tarly in Game of Thrones; and King Snodd is Matt Berry, who played a similarly mad boss in The I.T. Crowd. Richard E. Grant voices the final fire-breather, though is largely wasted in the role.

Chappell makes for a good, plucky heroine, even if her willingness to accept the hand dealt to her is a little fatalistic. Why not just walk away? Can’t kill the last dragon if you don’t pick up the sword – even if it does have your name engraved on it. While light in tone, this does have its action beats, not least when Jennifer has to fend off an assassination attempt, and an occasional moment of surprising poignancy. The finale perhaps asks more questions than it answers, and it’s clear the aim is an ongoing saga of films to follow the books (there are three volumes in the series by Jasper Fforde with a fourth in preparation). Yet if this does become a Christmas Day media tradition in Britain, it’s one to which I’d not object at all,

Dir: Jamie Magnus Stone
Star: Ellise Chappell, Anna Chancellor, Andrew Buchan, John Bradley

Burned, by A. Blythe

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

My name is Alyse Winters. I used to be a powerful djinni until…
   “We’ve got a burn notice on you – you’re blacklisted.”
When you’re burned, you’ve got nothing. No cash, no credit, no job history. You’re stuck in whatever city they decide to dump you in.
   “Where am I?”
   “Philadelphia”.
You do whatever work comes your way. You rely on anyone who’s still talking to you. A sleazy ex-boyfriend. A friend who runs a sex-shop/illegal weapons depot. Bottom line? Until you figure out who burned you… You’re not going anywhere.

Yeah, it’s kinda like that: a paranormal version of long-running series, Burn Notice. Heroine Winters is an agent for the Shadow Elite, tasked with keeping order across the six different castes of djinni, a shape-shifter also capable of summoning virtually anything she needs with a snap of her fingers. She gets knocked out, and wakes to find herself in Phillie, sporting a fetching pair of copper bracelets that have robbed her of all supernatural skills, and entirely disavowed by her employers.

She needs to get herself back on her feet, figure out who was responsible and why, before some of the many people with good cause to bear a grudge against her, discover where the powerless ex-agent is now located. Doing so will require her to come to to terms with being locked in a single human form with very human limitations, as well as working for some questionable types who might be able to help Alyse. She also needs to figure out who is behind a series of brutal murders which are affecting even the most powerful members of her community – not least because the finger of suspicion there is pointing at her.

The “catch the real killer to prove you’re not guilty” reminded me of Fugitive of Magic, and even the cover looks a bit similar. Between that and the Burn Notice comparisons, this does feel over-familiar, even with the supernatural angles. But I did very much like the heroine, who is thrown back onto her wits, due to the lack of her paranormal talents, and refreshingly, simply doesn’t have time for the usual romantic dalliances. As she says, “When you’re a covert agent, stopping to process gets you killed. Feelings get you killed. I was trained to handle intense and dangerous situations without breaking a sweat… That’s how I survived every encounter so far, and that’s how I intended to survive my current predicament.”

On the other hand, this is a slightly thin storyline: can’t help suspecting, the original Michael Westen would likely have got everything here handled in 42 minutes, plus commercials. And the end collapses into sub-Bondian nonsense, the villain actually saying, “How about I show you our great achievement? I hate for you to die without knowing what your contribution will be. It wouldn’t be fair.” Really? It’s a poor and clichéd misstep, after which an otherwise half-decent book limps across the finish line.

Author: A. Blythe
Publisher: Red Palm Press LLC, available through Amazon, as both an e-book and paperback.
Book 1 of 3 in the Magic Bullet series.

Blaze, by Krista D. Ball

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

“Kiner and I have fought many battles together. All of us knights have seen our closest friends cut down in front of us. Some of us have seen family killed before our eyes. Even the most battle-hardened soldier can lose their minds when the blood flows. Always concentrate on staying alive. Focus on your target. Mourn your friends later. Honor them by staying alive.”

The half-elven Lady Bethany has shattered the glass ceiling for women in the military forces, rising to third in command, a position she has achieved on her own merit. Of course, it probably didn’t hurt that she is daughter of the goddess Apaxia, although her ancestry causes as many problems as it solves. This is due partly to some pesky secret prophecies which outline – in typically vague prophetic ways, with references to the “Diamond” and the “Viper” – Bethany’s very important place in future events, and partly her estranged twin sister, Sarissa. For she has turned to the dark side of magic, insanely jealous of her sister’s success, with the emphasis squarely on “insanely” there…

Meanwhile, Bethany feels a strange attraction to one of the new soldiers she is supposed to be training, the human Arrago, who seems to have a role to fulfill in prophecy as well. Yet what will happen when he finds out about Bethany’s divine origins? This makes for a solid enough bit of fantasy, though I am not certain it stands up to scrutiny. For instance, it’s well into the book before we discover Bethany actually had another sister, Drea, one who was not quite so gloriously barking mad. This was a “Wait, what?” moment, and something you think might have been mentioned when discussing her twin.

The other demerit is for Sarissa. Not that she’s a bad villainess. Quite the contrary: she’s so good at being bad, she’s an amazing scene-stealer. I’d rather have read more about her…ah, interesting world-view, rather than the Bethany-Arrago romance, which never manages to be convincing [I’ve always felt any human/elven romance is going to be on shaky ground, due to the difference in lifespans]. At the risk of treading on spoilers, it’s a real shame it turns out Sarissa isn’t quite the big bad she’s initially painted. That’s a pity, and significantly decreases the odds of me going back for subsequent volumes.

What I did like was Bethany’s interactions with colleagues such as fellow lords Jovan and Kiner: there’s a familiarity in these which rings true (and a crudeness to their humour which is not quite what I’ve experienced from fantasy elves). I just wish we’d been given more evidence of the heroine’s skills. It’s well past the half-way point before we see anything more than the literary equivalent of training montages. When they show up, they’re undeniably impressive – even before she has tapped into her full, literally god-given “power” – and I’d love to see a feature version of this, with Gwendoline Christie playing both sisters. But I do have to wonder how the long, red-haired Bethany mutated into the woman shown on the cover…

Author: Krista D. Ball
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as an e-book and a paperback
a.k.a. Tranqulity’s Blaze
Book 1 of 5 in the Tranqulity series.

Avengers Grimm: Time Wars

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★½
“Fairy disappointing.”

I was one of the few who didn’t mind Avengers Grimm, appreciating its poverty-row energy, while acknowledging it had little or nothing to do with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With Avengers: Infinity War storming the global box-office, it’s not much of a surprise to find The Asylum going back to the same well. However, despite the same director, and much of the same cast, the script botches the timey-wimey aspects badly enough that the first half, in particular, becomes a slog that’ll test the audience’s endurance.

The villainess here is Magda (Maya), the queen of Atlantis, who storms out of the ocean with her army of soldiers – well, there’s at least four of them, with any more appearing entirely through not very good digital copy/paste. She’s looking for Prince Charming (Marcel), as if he can be convinced to marry her, Magda will become ruler of the land as well as the sea. In her way is Lookingglass, an organization created by Alice (Licciardi) to protect Earth from all these fairy-tale threats. She gets the band back together: Snow White (Parkinson), Red Riding Hood (Elizabeth Eileen) and Sleeping Beauty (Marah Fairclough), the last-named of whom has her own interest in the Prince. Magda isn’t going to let them interfere with her plans of world domination, so throws them through a portal in time and…

Well, not very much. There’s an enormous amount of wandering around thereafter, in what has to be rampant padding to feature length. As just one example, Sleepy gets captured and stuck in a glass case – a situation with which viewers will certainly be able to empathize. While Rumpelstiltskin returns from the first movie, he’s now played by a different actor. And that The Asylum could apparently no longer afford Casper Van Dien, replacing him with someone cheaper less well-known, should probably be considered as a red flag. Confusing matters further, Prince Charming is black and sports a fake British accent. I found one of these things deeply offensive. :)

The main appeal of the original was seeing all these D*sney princess types being bad-asses, to varying degrees, and kicking ass – that appears here in VERY intermittent spurts. For example, Red still uses her bow, yet only on a couple of occasions, to the point it’s more of a token gesture. I’m not sure who’s responsible for the fight choreography here: it seems barely passable at best, and is often feeble. I don’t recall the predecessor being quite as bad in this department, though the mists of time may be working to its benefit. While Avengers Grimm was cheap and an obvious rip-off, it had enough gonzo energy to slide past. Time Wars is merely cheap and an obvious rip-off; as such, it probably has more in common with our other recent Asylum review, Tomb Invader. Not least, in that both sent me off to sleep during the duller moments.

Dir: Jeremy M. Inman
Star: Lauren Parkinson, Christina Licciardi, Michael Marcel, Katherine Maya

Rain Dance by D.N. Erikson

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Literary rating: ★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

The saying, “You only live twice,” is supposed to be a metaphor, but for Eden Hunter, it ends up being very much a statement of fact. She’s a former con-artist, dragged back from beyond the grave by vampire warlord, Aldric. He puts her to work on a hidden island as his personal soul-harvester, with a strict quota per week. It’s not great work, but it’s steady – at least until Eden’s beach-front house is attacked by a werewolf with murder on its furry mind. She then finds herself seen by the FBI as their prime suspect after an old partner in confidence tricks turns up dead on her doorstep. But, wait! There’s more! She has to deal with the rain goddess – presumably, the source of the title – to whom Eden is also in thrall, and whose rules she just broke. A gang involved in robbing her boss of millions in gold bullion. Her dead sister. A serial-killer politician. Oh, and a talking cat.

Overall, the main problem is that this feels like Book 2, rather than Book 1. Rather than starting off at what might be considered the more logical point of Eden’s first death, it joins her career as a reaper, already well in progress, opening with the werewolf attack. There is a fair amount of information – and quite important data, at that – which is not provided to the reader until some distance into the story. As the paragraph above suggests, there’s not exactly a shortage of plot threads either: as a result, some of them inevitably end up feeling under-developed. The goddess, for example, seems to show up at the end, purely to provide an adversary for the heroine’s boss, and I’m still not sure about the point of the politician. Conversely, some things feel under-explained. The island is supposedly hidden… yet the FBI know where it is? Who delivers – oh, I dunno – milk to it? It has an awkward sense of being something which looked a good idea at the time, only was never thought through properly.

It’s probably not the book’s fault, but there was a sense of deja vu too for me. Only a couple of months ago, I read Fugitive of Magic by Linsey Hall. It was also a story told in first-person perspective, about a paranormal heroine accused of a murder she didn’t commit, who has to find the real perpetrator in order to prove her innocence. Having recently read that story, I didn’t find a revised version of it especially interesting. The main positive is Eden herself, who made for a decent central character. There was a nice moral sense of grey about her choices, with her trying to do the right thing, even though those choices were frequently constrained by the unfortunate circumstances which she inhabited. If we’d been brought along with Eden on her resurrection, rather than being dumped into the middle of it, this would likely have been a more worthwhile story.

Author: D.N. Erikson
Publisher: Watchfire Press, available through Amazon as both a paperback and an e-book.
Book 1 of 3 (to date) in the Sunshine & Scythes series.

Nightblade: A Book of Underrealm by Garrett Robinson

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

One of the common problems I’ve found with fantasy novels is establishing the universe. It’s clearly going to be very different from the reader’s, and the author needs to get them up to speed on how things work in the book’s setting. If this isn’t done quickly and effectively, the reader can be left floundering in a world they know nothing about. Robinson uses a neat trick to get around this. His heroine, Loren, basically knows nothing about it either, because she has been brought up in a remote rural area. Virtually all she knows about life outside the woods comes from tales told to her by an itinerant tinker, and her dreams of becoming a heroic thief seem no more than fantasies.

That all changes when she encounters a fugitive, Xian the mage. Fed up with her life – and given the severely abusive parents, it’s hard to blame her – she throws her lot in with him. That’s how everything starts: as she discovers the world around her has a lot more to offer than household drudgery and arranged marriages, so do we. She has a couple of advantages over the usual runaway: she’s “country strong” having been brought up to hunt, providing her with a skill-set which will putt her in good stead to hold her own in a more urban environment. And on her departure, she takes a dagger, a family heirloom of sorts, which for some reason, strikes fear into the subset of those she encounters, who recognize it.

Loren is, perhaps, a little too well-prepared occasionally: while I can see how running and climbing trees would translate into parkour-like city skills, her adeptness at picking locks was a little eyebrow-raising. However, this ia a relatively minor issue, and more than outweighed by the strengths of Robinson’s writing. He draws a world which is easy to imagine in your mind’s eye, populated by a range of memorable characters. I appreciated the almost total lack of the near-compulsory romantic angles, and that Loren is far from the only strong woman to be found in these pages. Already, we have met Auntie, the shape-shifting mage who runs the underworld in the city of Cabrus, and Damaris, a scarily well-connected smuggler who helps Loren, yet appears to have her own agenda.

As the introductory book to a six-volume series, there is rather less than a complete story told here, though neither is there one of those oh-so annoying cliffhangers. There are instead questions, which will presumably be answered down the road. Where did Loren’s blade come from? What is its significance? What about the mysterious gems Damaris is smuggling? And who is Jordel, the man who is also after Xian, yet seems to keep encountering and assisting our heroine? I was left feeling fulfilled by what I had read, yet also wanting more, and that’s a combination which is not as frequently found as you’d expect.

Author: Garrett Robinson
Publisher: Legacy Books, available through Amazon, both as an e-book and a paperback
Book 1 of 6 in The Nightblade Epic series.

Fugitive of Magic by Linsey Hall

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Literary rating: ★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½

It’s probably worth noting that although this is Volume 1 in the somewhat clunkily-named “Dragon’s Gift: The Protector” series, it follows in the wake of two other Dragon’s Gift threads by the same author, The Huntress and The Seeker. While you don’t need to have read those to enjoy this, it does explain a structure, which could seem somewhat odd. For the volume sets up a trio of treasure-hunting magicians – Cass, Del and Nix – then all but discards the first two and concentrates heavily on Nix. Turns out Cass and Del were the subjects of the Huntress and Seeker sagas respectively, and the Protector gives Nix her turn in the spotlight. This is why some aspects, such as the shop run by the three women, seems more than a bit undeveloped: I presume they were featured in the ten or so previous volumes set in the same world.

With that out of the way… Nix is chasing down a shoplifting pack of demons, when she stumbles across a murder scene. The killer manages to frame her for the murder, which is unfortunate because the victim was a close ally of the vampire race. Their top enforcer, Ares, locks a nasty collar around Nix’s neck to ensure she doesn’t skip out before her date in court, three days hence. Worse still, their court contains mind-readers, who will undoubtedly discover her secret [shared by Cass and Del]. For as well as her relatively mundane conjuring skills, allowing her to pull things literally out of thin air, Nix is also a FireSoul. That’s a very, very forbidden talent, allowing her to absorb the abilities of others. In order to avoid exposure, she needs to locate the real killer, a quest that will bring her into an uneasy partnership with Ares, and take her to a long-forgotten castle in France, St. Pancras railway station in London, and other locations both magical and mundane.

“Find the real killer in X hours to prove your innocence, or else” is a fairly well-worn plot, but Hall manages to add enough novel elements to keep it fresh. The same is true of several other elements: the incredibly handsome, brooding vampire with whom the heroine has unresolved sexual tension, for example, manages to be be somewhat less irritating here than usual. I think the first-person narrative helps there: Nix’s inner monologue is nicely self-deprecating, and was more often than not in tune with what I was thinking as a reader. Ares is clearly there to do a large block of the heavy action work. But I was pleased to see that Nix does not hesitate to wade in there, right from the opening sequence, which sees her and her two friends engage in what is basically a pitched battle in the middle of the street against multiplying numbers of demonic entities.

I suspect you probably would be better off not leaping in to the universe like this, ten volumes down, and must confess to being slightly miffed something described as “Book 1” is far from being that. However, this was devoured at quite a rate, and offers a fast (if not particularly challenging or thought-provoking) and enjoyable read. Though the story clearly leads on to volume two, it doesn’t cliff-hanger the reader to death, and I’d certainly consider reading further – by which, I mean earlier – entries.

Author: Linsey Hall
Publisher: Bonnie Doon Press, available through Amazon, both as an e-book and paperback.