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Sabina, half vampire and half mage, has fled the West Coast after being betrayed by her grandmother Lavinia, the head of the vampiric Dominae. With her is Adam Lazarus, a powerful magic user, who gets her safely to New York City and the stronghold of the mages. Sabina has just found out that the mages are led by her twin sister Maisie, whom she didn’t know existed.
Adam and Maisie want Sabina to embrace her father’s legacy and learn Chthonic magic, the power of death and dark places. But Sabina’s path isn’t going to be that easy. As the mages and vampires hover on the brink of war, someone is manipulating events to get Sabina killed. What forces are moving behind the scenes, and what will that mean for Sabina?
I’ve of two minds about this book and this series. On the one hand, I did enjoy this book. I like the new touches that Wells have given to the vampires: their weakness to apples and the wood of the apple tree, due to Eve’s betrayal of Adam with an apple; the red hair marking them as children of Lilith, Adam’s first wife; the proscription against vampires and mages having children together, which leads to Sabina and Maisie. These little details gave the story a unique flavor that sets it apart from other paranormal fantasy novels.
The secondary characters step up and carry a good deal of the story here, which is good because one of the previous novel’s main characters is mostly out of the story. Adam, the mage who spent most of the last book with Sabina, is away for much of this one. In his place is Slade, a vampire who has a past with Sabina. Bringing in new characters isn’t bad, by any means, but I think it’s a little early in the series to put one of the main characters out of action. I found myself much more interested in Sabina’s demon familiar, Giguhl. He gets to inject a lot of the novel’s humor, and he also gets to do more than just hang around Sabina and be useful whenever she needs him. I was also interested in seeing more of the werewolf, Michael Romulus, but his role is limited in this story.
On the other hand, there’s not a lot in this book that advances the series’ overall plot. Sabina spends a good amount of time training in magic and dodging people trying to kill her. As mentioned, Adam is absent, so the romantic tension set up in Red-Headed Stepchild is put on hold. Much of the plot movement happens in the final chapters of the book. I wish that the intervening time had been used to establish the mage culture more solidly, but the mages are merely the background to Sabina’s involvement in the fate of the dark races. I think that a lot of what drives paranormal fantasy (beyond the almost inevitable romance elements) is the details of how the various races live and function. It’s those little tidbits of info that don’t quite get realized here.
Even so, I wasn’t kidding when I said that I found the book enjoyable. There’s lots of witty banter and some fight scenes, and sometimes that’s all that you need. I’m hoping that I won’t regret the slower plot in this book when I come to read the next one.
The Mage in Black combines some standard fantasy fare with some intriguing details that bring Wells’s vampires to life. With the greater involvement of mages and werewolves, I have high hopes for this series continuing to improve.
I'll have to look up this author. I've been pretty well turned off on paranormal for a while. Too many cliches and bad sex scenes.
ReplyDeleteThere are a couple of sex scenes in book two, just to let you know. They're not bad. There also seem to be fewer cliches in this series, and some neat details, like the apple wood thing.
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