Beyond the Shadows
2008
- fantasy
- assassination
- wetboy
- gods and goddesses
- assassins
- fiction
- crime, fiction
- fiction, mystery & detective, general
- fiction, fantasy, general
- science fiction, fantasy, horror
The story
A new queen has usurped the throne and is leading Cenaria into disaster. The country has become a broken realm with a threadbare army, little food, and no hope. Kylar Stern plans to reinstate his closest friend Logan as King, but can he really get away with murder? In the north, the Godking's death has thrown Khalidor into civil war. To gain the upper hand, one faction attempts to raise the goddess Khali herself. But they are playing with volatile powers, and trigger conflict on a vast scale. Seven armies will converge to save - or destroy - an entire continent. Kylar has finally learnt the bitter cost of immortality, and is faced with a task only he can complete. To save his friends, and perhaps his enemies, he must assassinate a goddess. Failure will doom the south. Success will cost him everything he's ever loved.
What it’s like
Cold grey light on stone, candlelit back rooms, and the long dusty roads of a war-scarred continent, rendered in the hard, economical prose of a fantasy thriller that keeps its scenes tight and its sentences lean. The sensory world is dense with rain, smoke, blood-dulled steel and the hunger of a starving countryside, while the sections set in the north open out into vast, almost apocalyptic panoramas of marching armies and a sky strained by divine power. Pacing is relentless, with short chapters that switch between factions and cut off on cliffhangers, and the mood is grim and tense, shadowed by betrayal and loss but threaded with friendship and the stubborn idea of sacrifice. Violence is frequent and often brutal: assassinations, close combat, battlefield carnage and some grisly deaths, with a steady undercurrent of dread and moral cruelty, though not much sexual content. This suits readers who want dark, plot-driven epic fantasy with a morally compromised assassin at its centre, best read in long stretches late at night rather than as a gentle escape.
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