A breathtaking installment of an unforgettable fantasy series.
Eliott’s genre-bending fantasy/thriller/romance novel, the second in a series, explores a hellish landscape.
The story opens amid the destruction and detritus left in the wake of the Swell Driver, a cataclysmic flood that has raged through the very heart of the violent, fantastical cityscape of Hell’s Labyrinth. The streets teem with sordid wreckage, and the waters have laid bare more than the buildings’ facades—the fragile peace of a community built on crime has been ripped from its foundations, laying bare a refuse-strewn path to power for those hungry enough to seize it. In this chaos, Count Ulan Gueritus, the Raving Blade, emerges from the shadows, seeking to inflict a reign of terror upon the masses. But the same darkness that spawned the Raving Blade forged the only man who can stop him: Vazeer the Lash. Unfairly implicated in Gueritus’ web of treason and desperate to protect those he loves, Lash initially hopes to outmaneuver the madman—but sometimes, justice must be born of blood. To stop the Raving Blade, Lash must realign with Radrin Blackstar, an assassin with his own agenda, and a host of former compatriots who would just as soon see Vazeer dead. As his city roils, Vazeer must consider how much darkness a man can take before its current pulls him under. In this second entry in the author’s Shadow Bidder series, the story’s gritty landscape is captured in gorgeous prose: “Even the street fires, which earlier had snapped and spit in vivid upheaval, were now but glum red mounds, simmering so low that the surrounding faces remained soiled by shadow.” Readers will find themselves continually on edge, questioning their loyalties and guessing at the next twist. This emotional investment is compelled by an excellently rendered cast of characters, chiefly Vazeer the Lash, a humorous and complex antihero. Radrin Blackstar provides a fascinating and ominous counterbalance as an allied assassin with unclear allegiances. Despite the novel’s cold and murky depths, the overall tone is hopeful, pulling audiences into Lash’s vision for a city rebuilt. And though Lash’s reality is often brutal, the violence is rarely graphic.
A breathtaking installment of an unforgettable fantasy series.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9798986706542
Page Count: -
Publisher: Further Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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