Fed up with his desk duty in the Imperial Arcane Library, book hunter Colin Bliss accepts a private commission to find The Sword's Shadow, a legendary and dangerous witches' grimoire. But to find the book, Colin must travel to the remote Western Isles and solve a centuries' old murder.
It should be nothing more than an academic exercise, so why is dour -- and unreasonably sexy -- Magister Septimus Marx doing his best to keep Colin from accepting this mission -- even going so far as to seduce Colin on their train journey north?
Septimus is not the only problem. Who is the strange fairy woman that keeps appearing at inconvenient times? And who is working behind the scenes with the sinister adventuress Irania Briggs? And why do Colin's employers at the Museum of the Literary Occult keep accusing Colin of betraying them?
As Colin digs deeper and deeper into the Long Island's mysterious past, he begins to understand why Septimus is willing to stop him at any price -- but by then, it's too late to turn back. (Previously published by Loose Id Publishing)
I really, really, wanted to like this novel a lot, but it just didn't make it into the usual Josh Lanyon stratosphere like most of his other works have for me. The thing is, it has all the trappings of a really interesting fantasy/AU-based world setting, as well as two very likable MC's. The problem here is developmental, I think. If this was going to be the first novel in a proposed series, I would give it four (instead of three) stars out of five; but I don't think JL does more than one series at a time, and we're all waiting for the third book in the Homes/Moriarity series - The Boy with the Painful Tattoo - to drop.
The conceit of two of the "branches" of the Arcane Magickal Society being set in London and, across the "Great Big Ocean," in the "colonial" city of Boston is fascinating; especially with MC Colin Bliss coming from Boston to work as a librevator (book hunter) in London, where the story begins with a REALLY unhappy seduced-then-abandoned-by-his-married-boss Colin loathing one of his upper-management Vox Pessimentes (censor) managers, MC Septimus Marx. (They, of course, are MFEO.)
Colin quickly decamps to one of the Western Scottish Islands in search of the most powerful grimoire ever put between two sheets of beaten gold, and *quelle surprise* Septimus is hot on his tail (npi, but yeah!) as Colin and Septimus (way too easily) find True Love as well as the sought-after book.
It's this ease of everything working-out that makes me gripe, and wish for Lanyon to either have made this a true novella, which I could accept, or expand it another couple of hundred pages into a full novel and really sink us into the fascinating world of the Arcane Magickal Society.
But, nooooo! We get a really great first-few-chapters set-up; then a mad rush to get the boys between the sheets; with the book finished in the most expeditious of manners.
Such a shame, too! Both MC's are genuinely worth knowing, and their world (both in London, and in Boston at Boston Blackie's, the the Society's bookstore-front for its exploits in the colonial New World) is truly worth exploration.
If you don't mind a relatively short novel, you can never go wrong with Josh Lanyon; but, honestly, I would recommend the similarly short, but more fleshed-out (in every sense) supernatural A Ghost of a Chance, or the noirish Cards on the Table, over this high-aiming, but only middlingly successful shot at world-building.
Fed up with his desk duty in the Imperial Arcane Library, book hunter Colin Bliss accepts a private commission to find The Sword's Shadow, a legendary and dangerous witches' grimoire. But to find the book, Colin must travel to the remote Western Isles and solve a centuries' old murder.
It should be nothing more than an academic exercise, so why is dour -- and unreasonably sexy -- Magister Septimus Marx doing his best to keep Colin from accepting this mission -- even going so far as to seduce Colin on their train journey north?
Septimus is not the only problem. Who is the strange fairy woman that keeps appearing at inconvenient times? And who is working behind the scenes with the sinister adventuress Irania Briggs? And why do Colin's employers at the Museum of the Literary Occult keep accusing Colin of betraying them?
As Colin digs deeper and deeper into the Long Island's mysterious past, he begins to understand why Septimus is willing to stop him at any price -- but by then, it's too late to turn back.
(Previously published by Loose Id Publishing)
I really, really, wanted to like this novel a lot, but it just didn't make it into the usual Josh Lanyon stratosphere like most of his other works have for me. The thing is, it has all the trappings of a really interesting fantasy/AU-based world setting, as well as two very likable MC's. The problem here is developmental, I think. If this was going to be the first novel in a proposed series, I would give it four (instead of three) stars out of five; but I don't think JL does more than one series at a time, and we're all waiting for the third book in the Homes/Moriarity series - The Boy with the Painful Tattoo - to drop.
The conceit of two of the "branches" of the Arcane Magickal Society being set in London and, across the "Great Big Ocean," in the "colonial" city of Boston is fascinating; especially with MC Colin Bliss coming from Boston to work as a librevator (book hunter) in London, where the story begins with a REALLY unhappy seduced-then-abandoned-by-his-married-boss Colin loathing one of his upper-management Vox Pessimentes (censor) managers, MC Septimus Marx. (They, of course, are MFEO.)
Colin quickly decamps to one of the Western Scottish Islands in search of the most powerful grimoire ever put between two sheets of beaten gold, and *quelle surprise* Septimus is hot on his tail (npi, but yeah!) as Colin and Septimus (way too easily) find True Love as well as the sought-after book.
It's this ease of everything working-out that makes me gripe, and wish for Lanyon to either have made this a true novella, which I could accept, or expand it another couple of hundred pages into a full novel and really sink us into the fascinating world of the Arcane Magickal Society.
But, nooooo! We get a really great first-few-chapters set-up; then a mad rush to get the boys between the sheets; with the book finished in the most expeditious of manners.
Such a shame, too! Both MC's are genuinely worth knowing, and their world (both in London, and in Boston at Boston Blackie's, the the Society's bookstore-front for its exploits in the colonial New World) is truly worth exploration.
If you don't mind a relatively short novel, you can never go wrong with Josh Lanyon; but, honestly, I would recommend the similarly short, but more fleshed-out (in every sense) supernatural A Ghost of a Chance, or the noirish Cards on the Table, over this high-aiming, but only middlingly successful shot at world-building.