"You said no?" the girl shrieked, crushing the letter in her fist. "You didn't even think you should ask me first?"
Following the
events of Fortune’s Pawn, we find Devi Morris, the kick-ass mercenary who is
the hero of the Paradox trilogy, recovering from a mysterious attack that has
left her a fellow merc dead and some major holes in her own memory. As she
struggles with her own issues (which include seeing things no one else can such
as a black stain spreading across her hands whenever she gets angry), Devi
tries to make sense of the people she is serving with and to close the gap in
her memories.
Rachel Bach had
been on my radar for a while through her alter-ego, Rachel Aaron and The Spirit
Thief series. Although I have yet to actually read that fantasy series, I did
read Ms. Aaron’s book on her writing process 2,000 to 10,000 and loved her
voice as well as her great advice. So when I read on her blog that she had a
new series coming out, that it was a self-contained trilogy to be released over
a six-month period and that it was a space opera starring a mercenary...
I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it!
I thoroughly
enjoyed Fortune’s Pawn, which reads like a space opera revisited by an urban
fantasy author. The collision of tropes worked a treat and when the story broke
off on a HUGE cliffhanger, I couldn’t wait to get back to Devi’s weird,
wonderful, complicated universe.
Honour’s Knight
does not lose any of the momentum that Ms. Bach ended Fortune’s Pawn with.
Instead, she picks up all of the story threads and launches them into orbit. I
was a little worried that the entire book was going to be Devi trying to get
her memories back, but thankfully that specific storythread was nicely wrapped
up relatively quickly, allowing the book to explore a lot of interesting
territory. We learn a lot about what is actually going on with Devi’s
mysterious employer, the huge galaxy-wide threat he is facing and the lengths
he is willing to go to fight off that threat, while putting Devi into a
complicated moral conundrum – just how far is too far when it comes to
sacrifying the few for the many?
Devi herself is
put through the wringer in this one, from her complicated relationship with
cook Rupert (a romance that is handled extremely well and very believably
considering what each of them are willing and able to do the other as the story
progresses without a pat solution at the end), to the shattering of her belief
system as we get a glimpse at the deified royalty of Paradox mentioned in the
last books. As all of this is going on, though, Devi continues to kick some
serious ass, which is one of the great successes of this trilogy and a
wonderful ‘steal’ from the urban fantasy genre: the depiction of a strong,
powerful female character. Devi is not someone anyone should ever piss-off.
Alliances shift,
surprises are sprung and things end with Devi and Rupert alone in the unknown,
the book ending on another cliffhanger nicely setting up the third book,
Heaven’s Queen, which is due in April. Honour’s Knight took everything that
worked in the first book and shifted it into warp speed, continuing a fantastic
space opera trilogy. I gave this 4 strange blue invisible bugs out of 5.
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