And on to the final book I started on my holiday last week and I'm all caught up.. One good thing about my hotel being a three-hour coach ride from the airport, it meant the last day I had those three hours plus the four-hour flight for uninterrupted reading.
This is the first part of a trilogy by Mark Morris. I thought from the title that it would be about werewolves, but I was extremely wrong.
Alex Locke is an ex-convict, working as a lecturer in a university twenty years after breaking away from the criminal underworld and making an honest living for himself. When his eldest daughter is threatened, he makes a desperate call to an old acquaintance from prison for help and finds himself pulled back into the life he has successfully evaded for decades.
He is forced to steal an artefact from an old man– the Obsidian Heart that gives the trilogy its title- but things go very wrong very quickly. He finds himself on the run, trying to just survive the pursuit from the Wolves Of London, a group of supernatural assassins, intent on obtaining the Heart for themselves.
The Obsidian Heart is more than just a decoration, it’s an object of extreme power, and Alex must figure out how to harness it, before things go too far out of control.
This is the third book I’ve read this month that mixes crime drama with the supernatural. It’s very different to the other two though. Like Relics, it starts with a good grounding in reality, but in this book, the fantastical elements are far more pronounced.
The bad guys are genuinely nightmarish and the storyline is unpredictable once the "one last job" trope is past. The whole thing is compulsively readable (I did it in 2 days although I did have a LOT of spare time the second day) and very well written, We sympathise with Alex and his plight, and his quest to save his daughters feels heartfelt (sorry).
The only negative I have about this book is the lack of resolution to any of the lead plotlines at the end. I appreciate a cliffhanger ending, but I would have liked to see at least one plotline completed, or some questions answered. I know it's book one of a trilogy, and I have books 2 and 3 all ready and waiting on my shelves where it will all play out, but this didn't feel like an ending, just a springboard to book two.
Nothing is going to stop me reading book 2, as this was a damned good read and up there with the best I've read from Mark Morris. I just hope book 2 has a more satisfying ending.
No comments:
Post a Comment