FROSTFIRE

A Trylle Trilogy spinoff features new beautiful trolls from a different tribe—the Kanin.

Ambitious Bryn’s plan is to earn an appointment to the elite guard, the Högdragen, by serving as a tracker. She idolizes one of the Högdragen, the handsome and wildly talented Konstantin Black—until he attempts to murder the chancellor, her father. She and her father survive, and she throws herself into her training with the new vow of hunting down the renegade Konstantin to bring him to justice. Four years later, she’s an accomplished tracker, finding Kanin changeling children in the human world and bringing them home (but not before draining the trust funds that their wealthy adoptive parents give them—a keystone of the Kanin economy). During a routine assignment, she suddenly comes face to face with Konstantin, who also pursues her target. She gets the changeling to safety but is baffled by a strange sympathy she feels for Konstantin. Soon another tracker encounters him, establishing a mystery: Why is he after the changelings? The plot’s generally accessible to readers new to Hocking’s universe, though they may be frustrated by gaps in explanations of the world’s mechanics. Besides the Konstantin plot, Bryn also struggles against feelings for her handsome superior officer as well as with race and class issues, as she’s only half-Kanin and therefore looked down upon. The ending is painfully abrupt.

Good for fans of romance and the genre.