A promising, if meandering, start; given the experienced hands we’re in, it will undoubtedly pay off by series’ end.
In the first of a trilogy, a city faces a secret crisis of rulership.
The city of Kithamar’s new prince, Byrn a Sal, has died within a year of his coronation. Why and how did he die? The answer involves an ambitious thief seeking revenge for her brother’s murder, the fellow thief who secretly loves her but despises the path she's on, a foreign priestess searching for her missing son, a noblewoman who serves at the head of a religious cult, and the dangerous, centuries-old secret behind the royal succession. Abraham is best known for being one-half of James S.A. Corey, the writing team responsible for The Expanse, the bestselling space opera book series and the source for the fan-favorite TV show. It's a shame that Abraham doesn't gain equal attention for his excellent, delicately barbed political fantasy series, such as The Long Price Quartet and The Dagger and the Coin. This new work bears the hallmarks of a great Abraham work: intricate and dirty schemes enacted by initially sympathetic characters who make self-serving choices that they will eventually come to regret, but often too late to change course. It takes a long while for the broader outlines of the plot to take shape because of the narrow perspective of each of the characters. The fate of a great city is at stake, but the lower-class characters are mostly concerned with getting enough to eat each day and pursuing personal agendas if there’s any time left over. Most of the upper-class ones and their servants are occupied with preserving a magical and social status quo to the exclusion of anything else. The middle class—well, we barely hear from them, so who knows? The secret truth that Prince Byrn a Sal was not the legitimate heir to the throne drives the plot, but we never even find out whether or not he was a good ruler; that doesn’t seem to matter to all parties concerned. The blank spots in the reader’s understanding can feel frustrating at first but ultimately make the society seem real.
A promising, if meandering, start; given the experienced hands we’re in, it will undoubtedly pay off by series’ end.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-42184-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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