THE FALLEN & THE KISS OF DUSK

Asar and Mische reunite to steal the power of a god in the fourth installment of Broadbent’s Crowns of Nyaxia series.

After the dramatic conclusion of the previous novel, The Songbird & the Heart of Stone (2024), Mische is dead and in the underworld. She’s greeted by Vincent, the long-dead vampire king of the House of Night, who shows her how the underworld is literally cracking at the seams. It’s supposed to be a safe place, where souls are judged and pass through on their way to the final oblivion of true death. But the underworld Mische finds herself in is filled with monsters that eat souls, and she sees literal tears in reality that bleed like physical wounds. As Vincent explains, when Mische saved her lover, Asar, from being sacrificed at the end of the previous book, important relics that were holding the underworld together wound up being destroyed. Asar, meanwhile, has been imprisoned by the gods of the White Pantheon. Instead of killing Asar, the botched sacrifice gave him a god’s power, and the other gods aren’t interested in sharing. Except for one god, whom Vincent refuses to name, who has offered Mische a chance to rejoin Asar so they can both escape the White Pantheon’s clutches. If Mische accepts this offer of help, there’s a chance that she and Asar could outrun the gods long enough to secure Asar enough power to repair the underworld and obtain true divinity. If they fail, the problems afflicting the underworld will eventually spread, the mortal and vampire worlds will also crumble, and Mische will slip back into death—permanently. Broadbent has a solid technical grasp on writing action and romance scenes and keeps a firm track of characters and space as the head-spinning action progresses. As a vampire-themed dark fantasy, the book has lots of dramatic violence and plenty of monsters, but it all flits by without much narrative consequence because there’s simply so much going on.

Less is more, even in epic fantasy romance.