12/08/2014
Struggling with enemy kings and gods, the new Republic of Adro fights its hardest battles against its own people in this sharp and moving conclusion to McClellan’s French Revolution–inspired fantasy. Field Marshal Tamas, returning from behind enemy lines with new allies (acquired in 2013’s The Crimson Campaign), rushes to reunite his divided army, which was split by treason and is still facing the overwhelming forces of an invading monarch. He finds himself again surrounded when a foreign nobleman occupies the capital, Adopest, to run for the new post of First Minister. Magic clashes with divinity as Tamas’s son, Taniel Two-shot, and Taniel’s shaman companion struggle to keep a vengeful god under restraint. And Nila, a former laundress, faces the results of using her new power to slay invading soldiers. McClellan is unafraid to show tragic consequences and he wisely resists tying up his plot into a too-neat conclusion, allowing some character deaths and glimpses of the unending work of nation-building. While not as epic as some series, McClellan’s work will please fantasy readers with a historical bent and a taste for the bittersweet. Agent: Caitlin Blasdell, Liza Dawson Associates. (Feb.)
12/01/2014
The Kez Army is marching on the Adro forces, while betrayal and corruption weaken them from within. Even the return of Field Marshal Tamas might not be enough to save Adro, especially if Tamas's son, Taniel, fails in his efforts to control a god bent on destruction. While everyone is focused on the front, an even larger threat might lie in wait back in the capital of Adopest. VERDICT McClellan's fitting conclusion to the trilogy (Promise of Blood; The Crimson Campaign), which introduced an amazing world of rival traditions of magic at war with one another, a world of blood-soaked battlefields, gunpowder-snorting powder mages, and gods who can't help interfering in the mortal world. The action scenes are especially well done, although readers wouldn't care about the outcome if the author had not crafted such wonderfully flawed characters.
★ 2014-12-16
Final part of the Powder Mage trilogy (The Crimson Campaign, 2014, etc.) about—well, mix the American Revolution with the Civil War, stir in gods, magic, power politics and what-all, and you'll get the flavor.Adro is being invaded by overwhelming forces—armies, gods, dark magic—from Kez. Again, the narrative focuses on three key figures. Field Marshal Tamas, a powder mage, one who eats or snorts gunpowder in order to gain magic powers, having been trapped behind enemy lines and facing annihilation, returns to the capital, Adopest, only to find it occupied by yet another invading army. His new allies, the Deliv, won't arrive for weeks, and in the meantime, his beleaguered, fractious army faces not only the innumerable Kez armies, but internal dissent and outright treachery. Among other problems, the traitors are pursuing Tamas' son, Taniel Two-shot, a powder mage and master marksman, who finds his own powers growing even without the boost offered by gunpowder, and Taniel's companion, the mute, barbarian female witch Ka-poel, who, by means of her incomprehensible magic, has confined the terrifying god Kresimir. And Tamas charges retired police inspector Adamat, who's wrestling with his own personal tragedy, with investigating the situation in Adopest. It's complicated by the fact that, at the beginning, none of the three knows whether any of the others are still alive. So, fully realized characters contend with a stunning tangle of plots, counterplots, perfidies and conundrums against a highly textured backdrop. The action sequences that intersperse all this are as ferocious as ever, and it's so inventive that it sometimes seems as though McClellan's doing it just because he can. A slam-bang conclusion to an outstanding trilogy.
