Doom is inevitable; it will be interesting (and no doubt, heart-wrenching) to see what form it will take.
This grimdark political fantasy thriller is the second of a trilogy chronicling the fall of an empire.
Imperial Justice Sir Konrad Vonvalt; his clerk (and the novel’s narrator), Helena Sedanka; and their two companions have traveled to Sova, capital of the Empire of the Wolf. There they intend to confront the traitorous Justices of the Magistratum, who have been sharing their secret magical knowledge with zealous priest Patria Bartholomew Claver, and gain the emperor’s assistance in going after Claver, who is currently raising an army and may have designs on the throne. But their efforts are stymied by the suspiciously timed kidnapping of the Emperor’s grandson, which Sir Konrad is ordered to investigate, and the debilitating illness afflicting Sir Konrad, the result of a hex cast by Claver. As Sir Konrad and his compatriots seek to solve a mystery, discover a cure, and find allies against Claver in an increasingly complex and treacherous political landscape, Helena battles both her feelings for Sir Konrad and her repugnance for some of his recent ruthless actions, which suggest that he is more and more willing to ignore the letter of the law in his pursuit of both justice and vengeance. While the previous installment, The Justice of Kings (2022), was pretty dark, this volume gets even grittier, as the remaining scraps of Helena’s naïveté about Sir Konrad’s character and the nature of his work are brutally burned away and any faint hope that law might win out against might and self-serving politicking is crushed out in a fairly definitive way. It is now obvious that this empire of fractious, recently conquered nations is beyond saving, and all the characters can do is fight toward preserving whatever safety they can. This book travels even further beyond the traveling investigator/justice dealer mold of Tremayne’s Sister Fidelma and van Gulik’s Judge Dee series and more squarely into territory reminiscent of Andrzej Sapkowksi’s Hussite trilogy, another complex and dark historical fantasy series inspired by medieval state-military-church political conflicts.
Doom is inevitable; it will be interesting (and no doubt, heart-wrenching) to see what form it will take.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780316361682
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
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
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
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