The Robin on the Oak Throne

Linde presents the second installment in her ongoing urban fantasy series starring a daring young thief.

Following her 2024 book The Wren in the Holly Library, the author continues the adventures of her main character Kierse, a young woman whose New York City stomping grounds are suffused with supernatural beings and maintains a tense peace thanks to the Monster Treaty (the book’s standard fantasy-novel map depicts a mystically transformed Manhattan). In the previous book, Kierse met a charismatic but forbidding warlock named Graves under perilous circumstances; readers wanting more of their tense, combustible relationship will be happy to see Graves return in this sequel. Again, Kierse must undertake a daring theft; again, things go wrong, and when Graves saves her, she’s obliged to undertake a mission for him, despite her bitter feelings (“For a time, she’d even thought she could read him when no one else could,” readers are told. “How wrong she had been”). Graves is a powerful figure, but Kierse has magic of her own: To a point, she can absorb and simply ignore magic spells and potions. This a great advantage for a thief, but will it be enough for the epic adventure Graves assigns her, particularly when some of her enemies are dead set on destroying the Monster Treaty once and for all? Thanks to Linde’s tremendous narrative energy, readers will certainly want to learn the answer to that question—like its predecessor, this is a very readable, page-turning adventure story. There is a fair amount of lazy, slangy, or cliched language to contend with (like a mention of “dark bedroom eyes,” or characters saying “showtime” before they go into action), and it seems like every fourth word in the text is an f-bomb. Despite these flaws, the electricity between Kierse and Graves is captivating throughout.

A gripping if sometimes-formulaic fantasy about a thief and a warlock navigating a tense relationship.