A fascinatingly detailed and murder-fueled adventure in a violent fantasy setting.
In Walker’s fantasy novel, the destinies of disparate characters converge in a spasm of violence.
Death haunts the land of Baelon: Years ago, young Princess Lewen died, followed by her mother, Queen Isadora, and the great architect Adrian Dunn. As the book opens, a man named Reynard Rascall, with the help of his eager principal henchman, Spiro, kills a terrified underling named Kasparr, who’s been underperforming recently as a member of the Guild of Takers. In the kingdoms of Baelon, the Guild is an all-pervasive crime syndicate, “an unpleasant fact of life” throughout the land. Its leaders plot the fates of entire nations in their secluded headquarters; overseers (such as Reynard) are capos controlling regions, and at the bottom of the ladder are the lowly street-level Takers. Reynard and Spiro travel to Kasparr’s district to examine his books, but, unbeknownst to them, the bookkeeper himself has been murdered by a group of Takers. Meanwhile, Mari Dunn, the architect’s widow, is plagued by visions predicting the assassination of King Axil of Aranox; the king’s marshal, Erik Carson, acts to save the king, and the king’s former guardsman, the grizzled warrior Rolft Aerns, returns to the capital city on a vengeance quest of his own—he’s eventually aided by Mari’s daughter, Sibil. Walker’s decision to alternate his narrative focus between all of these characters is smart and well done here, enabling him to largely avoid the stilted exposition that’s the bane of so many fantasy novels. The viewpoint-jumping keeps the reading experience fresh, though it sometimes slows momentum and gives rise to confusion. Some characters are unavoidably more compelling than others—it’s a safe bet that most readers will favor the hilarious duo of Reynard and Spiro (“Intuition, my friend,” Reynard taunts poor Spiro at one point. “A faithful companion of the thoughtful. Little wonder you’ve not met”).
A fascinatingly detailed and murder-fueled adventure in a violent fantasy setting.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9798988923213
Page Count: 305
Publisher: Fairytale Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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