The seventh series installment in Hambly’s series (Darkness in His Bones, 2015, etc.) is laden with enough flashbacks,...
Mortals form an uneasy alliance with vampires during World War I.
Dr. Lydia Asher barely has time to sleep as she assists the field surgeons treating the casualties from the front lines at Ypres. But she’s still alert enough to notice mysterious shapes flitting in and out. She knows who they are, after years of fighting vampires alongside her husband, Oxford lecturer Jamie. One of them is Don Simon Ysidro, a former 16th-century courtier now posing as a British officer at the field hospital. Though he and his fellow vampires are dining off the hopelessly wounded and dying, Lydia finds his presence and protection comforting. Back in England, Jamie collaborates with a vampire, the Master of London, to track down one of what the vampires call the Others. The Foreign Office wants to capture this creature—a revenant neither living nor dead, turned mindless and vicious by a corruption of the blood. After spending 17 years with the Secret Service, Jamie knows all too well the ethical issues that can arise, and be ignored, for the supposed common good. But he’s repelled by the government plan to turn German POWs into revenants and use them as cannon fodder. The Germans, it seems, have the same plan, and the race is on. The revenants can spread their condition by a single drop of blood, they eat anything living (including vampires) in their paths, and they have a kind of collective conscience, like bees. Unsurprisingly, then, no one has yet discovered how to manage them. That’s about to change: back on the Continent, Lydia encounters Francesca the White, a renegade vampire who has the power to control the minds of the revenants. But who’s going to control Francesca in the war between the Undead and the Half-Dead?
The seventh series installment in Hambly’s series (Darkness in His Bones, 2015, etc.) is laden with enough flashbacks, unappetizing details, and earnest expository passages to exclude all but series (or vampire) fans.Pub Date: April 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8677-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally...
Yale’s secret societies hide a supernatural secret in this fantasy/murder mystery/school story.
Most Yale students get admitted through some combination of impressive academics, athletics, extracurriculars, family connections, and donations, or perhaps bribing the right coach. Not Galaxy “Alex” Stern. The protagonist of Bardugo’s (King of Scars, 2019, etc.) first novel for adults, a high school dropout and low-level drug dealer, Alex got in because she can see dead people. A Yale dean who's a member of Lethe, one of the college’s famously mysterious secret societies, offers Alex a free ride if she will use her spook-spotting abilities to help Lethe with its mission: overseeing the other secret societies’ occult rituals. In Bardugo’s universe, the “Ancient Eight” secret societies (Lethe is the eponymous Ninth House) are not just old boys’ breeding grounds for the CIA, CEOs, Supreme Court justices, and so on, as they are in ours; they’re wielders of actual magic. Skull and Bones performs prognostications by borrowing patients from the local hospital, cutting them open, and examining their entrails. St. Elmo’s specializes in weather magic, useful for commodities traders; Aurelian, in unbreakable contracts; Manuscript goes in for glamours, or “illusions and lies,” helpful to politicians and movie stars alike. And all these rituals attract ghosts. It’s Alex’s job to keep the supernatural forces from embarrassing the magical elite by releasing chaos into the community (all while trying desperately to keep her grades up). “Dealing with ghosts was like riding the subway: Do not make eye contact. Do not smile. Do not engage. Otherwise, you never know what might follow you home.” A townie’s murder sets in motion a taut plot full of drug deals, drunken assaults, corruption, and cover-ups. Loyalties stretch and snap. Under it all runs the deep, dark river of ambition and anxiety that at once powers and undermines the Yale experience. Alex may have more reason than most to feel like an imposter, but anyone who’s spent time around the golden children of the Ivy League will likely recognize her self-doubt.
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally dazzling sequels.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31307-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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