posted by
cat63 at 01:51pm on 03/04/2011 under 50 book challenge, better than i expected, books, fantasy, romance
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Heart's Blood by Gail Dayton. 418 pages.
I wavered a lot over buying this one, because it sounded as much Mills and Boon romance as Victorian urban fantasy, and while I rather like the latter, the former isn't really my thing. But on the whole, I think the 80p I paid for it was reasonable value for money.
The worldbuilding and magic rules that Dayton establishes are pretty good, the plot is reasonably interesting - head of one of four magical guilds wakes up near the body of a man killed by magic and has to solve the crime - and the characters had enough personality to be more than cardboard cut-outs.
The romance aspects were a bit cliched and cloying, but I could cope with that in light of the rest of it. The only thing that really annoyed me was that there was no explanation that I saw for the way that the protagonist "sleepwalked" to the site of the murder. Or perhaps I just missed that.
I wavered a lot over buying this one, because it sounded as much Mills and Boon romance as Victorian urban fantasy, and while I rather like the latter, the former isn't really my thing. But on the whole, I think the 80p I paid for it was reasonable value for money.
The worldbuilding and magic rules that Dayton establishes are pretty good, the plot is reasonably interesting - head of one of four magical guilds wakes up near the body of a man killed by magic and has to solve the crime - and the characters had enough personality to be more than cardboard cut-outs.
The romance aspects were a bit cliched and cloying, but I could cope with that in light of the rest of it. The only thing that really annoyed me was that there was no explanation that I saw for the way that the protagonist "sleepwalked" to the site of the murder. Or perhaps I just missed that.
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