Review: Mistress of the stone
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 23, 2013
A rollicking, well detailed cross-genre tale which mixes pirates with werewolves in the Caribbean.Luisa Tavares is a Portuguese sea-captain's daughter at the helm of her own pirate ship, the Coral. Her feminine side is kept well hidden though she privately enjoys captured silk clothes. Every man aboard has sworn an oath to her father to protect her and treat her with respect, and their loyalty is tested when word reaches Luisa that her father has been captured by a mad Frenchman called Luc Saint Saveur and taken to a Caribbean island known as Isla de Sempiterno.Barely pausing to spit at her injured English prisoner, Luisa sets course for the island. Her motley crew includes a fortune-reader and a devoted cabin boy, in a well-characterised set of people. The nautical details are realistic, if not always attractive, and at this point we realise that there is something odd about the injured Inglese Xander Daltry. What gives it away... could it be the bag of wolfsbane tied around his neck, or the speed of his healing from a severe wound?Some stirring adventures at sea later Luisa and Daltry reach Isla de Sempiterno, where the tone of the story changes: the lush jungle conceals horrors as creatures stalk them and the undead rise from the ground. Changing to a wolf form helps Daltry fight off vicious attackers such as gargoyles. By now Daltry has won Luisa's trust and he explains that the moonstone pendant she wears around her neck is the twin of one on the island, and the two must be brought together at the time of the blood moon to save his sister Sybil who is marooned there and cannot leave. His sister helps them, as a practising herbal witch, but Daltry has somehow neglected to mention that she is also a ghost.The island is home to villages of two shapeshifting clans: werehyenas and werewolves. Luc Saint Saveur is an alpha werewolf and inevitably he has used Luisa's father to lure the girl there in order to steal her moonstone for his own perverted purposes. Loyalty to Luisa may be the last thing that Daltry needs, but he admires her strength and resourcefulness and is determined to be her mate - if she will permit any man to love her.I don't normally read horror stories but I enjoyed this book, and I was able to skip over the few gruesome scenes and concentrate on the adventures, which were ably described with a lot of small details such as a cheeky pet monkey to add to the fun. I'll be looking out for more Maria Zannini, who has written other fantasy both urban and medieval.