Review: A Worthy Successor, With A Couple Issues
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 08 16, 2013
I already read and reviewed "The Royal Sorceress" when it came out, so it was a natural to read and review the sequel. Here goes...For starters, I really liked the beginning. It reintroduces Gwen well and features an amusing description of some upper-class occultist wannabes. Like the first novel the book is a quick, entertaining read, with an interesting mystery, a lot of clever intrigue, and a well-done plot twist involving a character who I suspected might be bad news but never knew just how bad he could be. Gwen has some awesome moments throughout, including a scene where she slaps down a particularly odious society matron. Chris also took the time to give a bit of back-story for sorcerer Bruno Lombardi, whose unexplained non-Britishness in the first novel stood out. And the book goes into some deeper explanation of Gwen's character and just how messed up the upper-class society she hails from is.This is not to say the work doesn't have flaws. Although Gwen is reintroduced well in the opening scene, Lucy and Lord Mycroft get no physical description when they reappear. This wasn't as much of a problem for Mycroft because I knew him from the Holmes canon, but it was for Lucy. I would have rather the ultimate villain retained some of his more sympathetic characteristics rather than having all of them be a facade for an evil, vengeful perverse fellow underneath. Shades of gray can be such fun. And there's a scene at the Privy Council in which the entire plotline is repeated that could have really been glossed over, since the reader already knows all of it even if the characters involved don't. So although the beginning all through the plot twist went well overall, the climax and denouement could have been done better.