A sweeping paranormal fantasy in which the worldbuilding often crowds out the plot.
A plucky vampire working as a maid in the palace conducts espionage to unravel the mystery of the heir’s murder.
Sam has spent the last decade working in the First Lord’s palace. She is immortal, like everyone else—or at least she has the potential to be. As a Worn, a member of the lowest vampire caste, she subsists on cowblood, which doesn’t stop the aging process. Sam has big dreams of moving out of her city, First Light, and passing herself off as a middle-class vampire somewhere else. Of course, the Grays—mortal enemies of the vampires—stalk the city walls and kill anyone who dares to leave. Still, Sam hoards information from the forbidden section of the First Lord’s library to barter and blackmail her way to freedom someday. That curiosity and hunger earn the attention of Daphnée, a lower-ranking vampire Lord who happens to be Queen Leech: commander of an army of Worn spies spread across the city. Lucky for Daphnée, Sam just found a clue that may solve the recent murder of the First Lord’s son, which the maid willingly adds to the Leeches’ amassed knowledge of First Light’s goings-on. Now, aided by a pair of magickless mages and a werewolf who hunts down rogue werewolves, Sam must piece together the mystery of Azzuri the Younger’s death...if she can survive long enough to gather her evidence. Crocker has developed a well-thought-out world here, complete with a vampire stock market for blood strains and centuries of lore. The novel often seems more concerned with showing off its worldbuilding than getting the reader invested in Sam’s mission, however, and the leaps to other characters’ points of view make it difficult to connect with her.
A sweeping paranormal fantasy in which the worldbuilding often crowds out the plot.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781250287731
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
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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