LADY-PROTECTOR

In the eighth book of the Corean Chronicles, a young ruler takes up magic against a sea of troubles.

Mykella has executed her uncle, the usurping Lord-Protector whose schemes killed her father and brother, but fresh crises loom. As the first Lady-Protector of Lanachrona, she faces a culture unaccustomed to being ruled by a woman; the corrupt nobles, who aided her uncle to strip the country of its gold and severely damage its infrastructure; invasion from neighboring lands; and an Ifrit incursion from two other worlds. On Mykella’s side are a few faithful retainers, her sisters, her indomitable will and integrity, and her powerful, not entirely understood, magical Talent, which can both sift truth from falsehood and kill the enemies she detects thereby. The characterization is fairly flat: The heroes are all noble and honest, and at worst, only temporarily misguided. There’s apparently nothing more to the human villains than greed and misogyny, and the nonhuman Ifrits express only race hatred and a fierce survival instinct. Modesitt (The Lord-Protector's Daughter, 2008, etc.) does an excellent job of laying out the protagonist’s web of predicaments in a fairly realistic, if somewhat slow and repetitious manner, only to rush to the climax and tie up at least some of the problems in a far-too-neat bow (which will probably partially unravel in a subsequent volume).

Fine for those already invested in the series.