A sumptuous bonus meal for fans who devoured the author’s Dynamicisttrilogy.
Science-based wizardry battles a demonic horde in Hunt’s latest fantasy epic.
The Methueyn War is well underway. The mad wizard Nehring Ardgour has invaded northern Engevelen using an army of skolves, or humanoid wolves, and the might of demons Skoll and Heti. The heavenly force of Methueyn Knights is dwindling, and the key to victory now lies with minor players who must rise toward greater destinies. Lt. Davignon “Dav” Delatam has seen a demon in action and has been summoned to aid Farrah Harbinger, Engevelen’s premier wizard. At Harbinger Hall, Farrah needs to find out which future path leads to Nehring’s defeat, and in order to do that, she needs Dav to interpret her visions. In the end, Farrah sees their city, Courant, destroyed and the One True Devil revealed. Meanwhile, near the city of Aurillon, Aveline “Ave” Vanier and Byron “Bro” Breaux are Deladieyr Knights, juniors to the Methueyn Knights. They carry the Methueyn Treaty, a massive 12-foot sword used in the ceremony that elevates a Knight, bonding them with a Methueyn angel. As the pool of candidate Knights shrinks, the pair prepare to send the newly risen Sir Revenberge into battle. And in Villiers, an older man known as Mick, who lives in a rest home, wants weaponry for himself and other residents, so they can defend against skolves. His sense of personal renewal begins when he saves a puppy, whom he names Fenris, from a damaged building. Greatness also calls for the wizard Halwyn Glace to push his skills further than ever alongside his fellow wizard and unrequited love, Lady Katherine Valcourt.
The events in Hunt’s latest epic occur 250 years before those in his Dynamicisttrilogy. In the prologue, Lady Koria Valcourt, Katherine’s ancestor, says, “The Methueyn Knights are an uninteresting subject, for they lacked the ability to change or grow.” This comment likens them to iconic heroes of myth, such as the Norse Thor (the bridge connecting to the Methueyn heavens is even called Bifrost, the name of a rainbow bridge in Norse myth). It also frames the narrative's main theme: that ordinary individuals can make decisions that shape history. Numerous motifs carry over from Hunt’s previous work, including a frustration with politics. Marias Garragorah, Nehring’s ambassador to Engevelen, reveals that “the best deals I have seen done, the real win-lose moments of history, have all been attended by an absence of empathy, remorse, or reciprocity.” The detailed magic system is visible in the actions of Grace, who physically incurs the thermodynamic cost of teleporting soldiers from danger (he gets colder). The demons in this book are impressively portrayed as forces of nature; we learn that, “As they drew closer to Skoll's passage, the smell of offal and rot increased....Logs, branches, produce, and shit were splashed everywhere.” The broadest human aspect is exemplified in the character arc of the elderly Mick. He’s done things he isn't proud of, but he now struggles to remember his life from moment to moment. As Fenris’ presence assures him, “He was alive, but he could see that it was all downhill...he felt sure somehow that it had all been to a purpose, to an idea that was still part of him.” Hunt exemplifies how to make heroes shine within the large cast of a sprawling saga.
A sumptuous bonus meal for fans who devoured the author’s Dynamicisttrilogy.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-77797-340-7
Page Count: 490
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.
A routine break-in at the home of Sûreté homicide chief Armand Gamache leads slowly but surely to the revelation of a potentially calamitous threat to all Québec.
At first it seems as if nothing at all triggered the burglar alarm at Gamache’s home in Three Pines; it was literally a false alarm. It’s not till he receives a package containing his summer jacket that Gamache realizes someone really did get into his house, choosing to steal exactly this one item and return it with a cryptic note referring to “some malady…water” and “Angelica stems.” Having already refused to meet with Jeanne Caron, chief of staff to Marcus Lauzon, a powerful politician who’s already taken vengeance on Gamache and his family for not expunging his child’s criminal record, Gamache now agrees to meet with Charles Langlois, a marine biologist with ties to Caron who confesses to a leading role in stealing Gamache’s jacket. Their meeting ends inconclusively for Gamache, who’s convinced that Langlois is hiding something weighty, and all too conclusively for Langlois, who’s killed by a hit-and-run driver as he leaves. The news that Langlois had been investigating a water supply near the abbey of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups sends Gamache scurrying off to the abbey, where the plot steadily thickens until he’s led to ask how “an old recipe for Chartreuse” can possibly be connected to “a terrorist plot to poison Québec’s drinking water.” That’s a great question, and answering it will take the second half of this story, which spins ever more intricate connections among leading players that become deeply unsettling.
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781250328137
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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