A remarkable fantasy series opener built on bold characters and startling real-world parallels.
In this fantasy, humanity has used technology to defeat several magical races, but total victory is not yet secure.
In the city of Silverfell, a man called Dryden visits the Silver Tongue tavern. There, beautiful elf women—and some men—sell their bodies alongside mugs of ale. Such is their plight after humanity used guns and mechanical might to defeat elves, orcs, and goblins almost a century ago in the Great War. Dryden meets Saya and Astanava, two elf women, while drinking. As he becomes hopelessly smitten with Astanava, he witnesses Earl Edard Kenton and his knights enter the tavern and harass Saya. Dryden’s secret—that he’s a Dartmoth prince traveling incognito—could halt the situation if asserted publicly. Instead, he attempts fisticuffs, which ends with him and Astanava landing in jail and Saya getting raped. Meanwhile, in the town of Osh, Fane Ganbaatar is an orc sheriff. Osh hosts the Book of Destiny in the temple complex of Issik Kul. The Book contains “a running list, thousands of pages long, of the...names of every person that would ever see the book, in chronological order.” One day, representatives of King Broderick Dartmoth come to inspect the Book. The endgame of Cole Wynton and his men is to confiscate and/or destroy all magical artifacts and weapons in Osh. Fane hopes to keep his enchanted ax a secret for as long as possible. And in the royal capital of Syerfordge, the king and his council plan to quell orc violence to the south once and for all—by firebombing the city of Angkor-Toll. In this dark series launch, Emrey (Millennium Stone, 2015, etc.) chooses a fertile time period, post–Great War, for the setting of his epic of heroism and race relations. As a royal, Dryden has access to era-specific technology, like a single-prop fighter plane and a Motor K automobile. He also has the privilege of springing himself from jail whereas the marginalized Astanava ends up at the mercy of Ser Dex Morton, a licentious prison warden. The author maximizes the scope of his narrative by having chapters follow Dryden, Astanava, and Fane down personalized alleys that converge after the stakes have risen. A humiliating flogging leads to Astanava’s accessing latent powers that Lt. Shpava, leader of an elf rebellion, deems invaluable. Angkor-Toll, once a hopeful city but now a ghetto, is filled with the downtrodden of every race. Blue and red fire dust, stand-ins for heroin and crack, have warped orc society and given King Broderick and his militant brother, Sawyer, their excuse for more war. Among the royal siblings, including Liliana, with whom Dryden is closest, only the globe-trotting prince argues that “dust is the problem,” not those addicted to it. Astanava’s transformation into a more empowered, if ghoulish, character is thrilling to behold. Fane and Dryden develop along entertaining, if slightly more predictable routes. Emrey’s greatest success lies in maintaining a shared spotlight for all three of his protagonists. On the verge of a second Great War, each character is poised to drive the sequel toward steeper dramatic heights.
A remarkable fantasy series opener built on bold characters and startling real-world parallels.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63393-845-8
Page Count: 434
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Thoroughbreds and Virginia blue-bloods cavort, commit murder, and fall in love in Roberts's (Hidden Riches, 1994, etc.) latest romantic thriller — this one set in the world of championship horse racing. Rich, sheltered Kelsey Byden is recovering from a recent divorce when she receives a letter from her mother, Naomi, a woman she has believed dead for over 20 years. When Kelsey confronts her genteel English professor father, though, he sheepishly confesses that, no, her mother isn't dead; throughout Kelsey's childhood, she was doing time for the murder of her lover. Kelsey meets with Naomi and not only finds her quite charming, but the owner of Three Willows, one of the most splendid horse farms in Virginia. Kelsey is further intrigued when she meets Gabe Slater, a blue-eyed gambling man who owns a neighboring horse farm; when one of Gabe's horses is mated with Naomi's, nostrils flare, flanks quiver, and the romance is on. Since both Naomi and Gabe have horses entered in the Kentucky Derby, Kelsey is soon swept into the whirlwind of the Triple Crown, in spite of her family's objections to her reconciliation with the notorious Naomi. The rivalry between the two horse farms remains friendly, but other competitors — one of them is Gabe's father, a vicious alcoholic who resents his son's success — prove less scrupulous. Bodies, horse and human, start piling up, just as Kelsey decides to investigate the murky details of her mother's crime. Is it possible she was framed? The ground is thick with no-goods, including haughty patricians, disgruntled grooms, and jockeys with tragic pasts, but despite all the distractions, the identity of the true culprit behind the mayhem — past and present — remains fairly obvious. The plot lopes rather than races to the finish. Gambling metaphors abound, and sexual doings have a distinctly equine tone. But Roberts's style has a fresh, contemporary snap that gets the story past its own worst excesses.
Pub Date: June 13, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14059-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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