Blurb:
"Arkady is in exile in Ramahn, the repressive Torlenian capital, where she makes some unexpected friends and some powerful enemies, all of whom seem bent on using her to wreak vengeance on each other.
Back in Glaeba, the King’s Spymaster, Declan Hawkes, has recruited the canine Crasii, Warlock, to spy on the Tide Lords attempting to steal the Glaeban throne. Warlock, desperate to get back to his pregnant mate, is forced to witness an unthinkable crime.
But things are not going smoothly for Declan, either. The Empress of the Five Realms and her family have turned up in Caelum, and Jaxyn Aranville wants any opposition to his plans for the Glaeban throne out of the way. That includes fabricating charges against Arkady’s husband, Stellan Desean, the Duke of Lebec, which are likely to bring her down, too.
And in the stark deserts of Torlenia, Cayal meets up with the enigmatic Tide Lord, Lukys, who convinces him he’s found a way for the tormented immortal to die. All he has to do is convince some of the other Tide Lords to help him. But with eight thousand years behind him in which to make enemies, that’s not going to be easy…"
Thoughts:
Still following the same formula as the original book, Fallon expands the number of cast members who become prominent in the story. Warlock and Declan Hawkes' characters are explored further, new characters join the fray, and the plot surrounding the origins of the immortals thickens immensely. Fallon also injects some excellent political intrigue in this novel, which is something I usually dislike in sci-fi/fantasy novels because it tends to overly complicate a good narrative. Fallon uses it to great effect to keep the storyline churning along.
Whilst it wasn't as much of a page turner as the first book, the chapters are much shorter, perhaps because there are more story threads occurring simultaneously and the author needed to context switch more frequently to keep everything moving at the same pace. Fallon manages to weave the disparate threads together quite nicely, and the pace of the story never gets tedious. For these reasons I found the book very easy to read in between doing other things, because I could read one or two chapters in a short space of time. Whilst the book doesn't answer a whole heap of questions posed by itself and it's predecessor, it did make me want to find out more.
Once again I needed a thesaurus for some of the words in Fallon's arsenal, nevertheless, the story telling is accomplished and satisfying. The author made good use of diverging story threads to create dramatic irony for the reader (Cayal and Arkady's story lines looking like crossing but not, and Declan Hawkes' suddenly becoming a major character and complicating any such tryst). At the same time, however, there is some satisfying conflict resolution at times, just not enough to kill the story!
A good, solid read.
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