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EMPIRE PALADIN

REALM OF THE DEAD

A religious historical fantasy that focuses on an ultimate battle between good and evil.

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A debut historical fantasy that pits God against the devil, and their magic-users against one another. 

In the year 1241, paladins—special warriors with magical abilities in service of the Christian church—are sent out into the world to enact God’s will and uphold his laws. Lord Vhaldrynn Malleus, one of the 12 strongest and high-ranking “primus” paladins, is using his healing powers on a battlefield when he’s informed that his own city has been mysteriously attacked by nearby armies. Vhaldrynn rushes back to his home, only to find a smoking ruin where his house once stood, and the burned corpses of his family. In his grief, he denounces God and his role as a paladin, and vows to get revenge. After promising to destroy the world in his rage, Vhaldrynn meets a mysterious stranger in the forest, whose evil identity quickly becomes apparent. While listening to the whispers of Lucifer, Vhaldrynn learns that his paladin powers didn’t abandon him when he denounced his faith, but are actually stronger than ever—and include the ability to raise an army of the dead. Now he can destroy anyone and anything that dares defy him. It ultimately falls to paladin Lady Camila Chastaine and her two companions to bring peace back to the world. Over the course of this violent fantasy tale, Valdez effectively keeps the action moving along. It’s steeped in religious lore throughout, and there is a complex hierarchy of paladins and church officials—which, as a result, means that there are a fair number of character names for readers to learn. Even so, the novel is a relatively short length for the genre—fewer than 200 pages. Still, despite its brevity, the author does a fair job of organically bringing each player onto the stage, rather than bogging the reader down with unnecessary exposition and wordy introductions.

A religious historical fantasy that focuses on an ultimate battle between good and evil. 

Pub Date: March 8, 2015

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 290

Publisher: Self

Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2019

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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DEVOLUTION

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

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THE NIGHTINGALE

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

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