This book has all the elements of epic fantasy that I’ve poked fun at in the past. You know the sort of thing – the lost heir to the kingdom, the enchanted sword (which has a name, naturally), the school for magic, the trusty sidekicks… I should have hated it, but instead I inhaled it almost at one sitting. Why? Because it’s so much fun. And there are positively no boring bits. The book starts in the most awesome way imaginable. Wardin Rath is a prince, whose uncle and father have just lost a war. Wardin is the last of his line, and will be the object of the victorious king’s searches until he’s found. And then killed. But Wardin is somewhere very special, the last Magistery in the kingdom, the sole remaining repository for magic in the land. If Wardin is tracked down there, not only his own life […]

Oh, that difficult second book of the series. The first is always full of surprises, every quirk of the author’s created world new and fresh. The final part is the big battle where evil is defeated, all the wrongs are set right and everything ends on a happy note. And then there are those middle books (this is the second in a planned five-book series). It’s very easy to drop the ball at this point, but here the author distracts with plenty of action and a whole heap of mysteries. Where are these precious sapwood seeds that both sides want so badly? Who is the traitor in the clan that’s supposed to be protecting them? And most of all, who can be trusted and who’s following their own agenda? The most delightful aspect of this series, for me, is the concept of place magic, something that our heroine, Verity, has […]

I don’t read a whole heap of urban fantasy, being more of an epic sort of reader myself, but this is a fun, just-one-more-chapter type of read. It’s my kind of book – quirky, original, with a surprise round every corner. When I tell you that the scene that sent shivers up and down my spine involved the bad guys simply walking around a building, you’ll understand that this isn’t your average let’s-hurl-thunderbolts-around urban fantasy. This is Hitchcockian (is that a word?) levels of tension. Here’s the plot: Verity has her own form of magic, a quiet type that involves writing spells on paper, which she uses for self-protection. She likes to keep a low profile, but an accidental encounter with some unpleasantness of the non-human variety draws her into a centuries-old war. She seeks refuge in her home town, where she’s just inherited an old hotel, but this is […]