This is a straight-up 1980's style fantasy book with the attempts at high diction, multi-kingdom politics, and the whole nine yards. Briggs lets her reader know right off the bat that this is one of her first novels and that she's done her best to spruce it up while staying true to the spirit of the original, and that's a fair warning for a reader to take while journeying into this tale. She does a good job of toeing the line of romantic tension without crossing over into maudlin grocery store romance. The book has love, but no love scenes (what I like to call "Granny porn") and after some of the books I've recently read, that is a welcome relief.

Our central character is a royal bastard, of the literal variety, who has left her father's court in favor of a more exciting life as a mercenary spy. Aided by her halfbreed shape-changer status, she's able to insinuate herself into several organizations, including the household of the antagonist, a very, very power-drunk arch wizard. This is where Briggs begins her tale, with the protagonist in the middle of spying on the big bad guy, a good place to begin.

I am a fan of Briggs's novels, particularly the Mercedes Thompson series, and I can see in this early book the sort of character development that leads me to love her other books. Her people are real. They aren't perfect, and their behavior follows from their qualities and imperfections. Her stories make sense. I never get the sense of an author flailing around trying to write herself out of a corner; on the contrary, I never think of the author when I'm reading one of her books, and that I think is a mark of a good writer.