Books 2014 - The Magpie Lord by K.J. Charles

[byslantedlight]

Exiled to China for twenty years, Lucien Vaundry never planned to return to England. But with the mysterious deaths of his father and brother, it seems the new Lord Crane has inherited an earldom. He's also inherited his family's enemies. He needs magical assistance, fast. He doesn't expect it to turn up angry... Evil pervades the house, a web of plots is closing around Crane, and if Stephen can't find a way through it - they're both going to die.

Okay, this feels like cheating a little, because this is the second time (this year) that I've read this book (what can I tell you, I have fan-ish tendencies... *g*) - but, but-but-but... this was the actual printed version! It's a real book with pages, yeay! I can flick through them, and go back and forth as much as I like... Yeay!

And I still like it, too. As far as Readers in Peril goes, there's a definite tang to the air - this is Victorian England with a magical twist, and K.J. Charles has introduced some things that really did made me shudder a bit. She's got the names of some things just right - how horrid does a Judas jack sound (...gnarled wood, carved in a roughly humanoid shape, riddled with holes.... It looked as though it would feel oily...), a piece of craft used to instill feelings of despair and suicide in a person. The end of the story involves a charnel posture, which is also as nasty as it sounds.

it does, rather oddly, use modernisms in the character's speech (a la Downton Abbey), but the slightly alternative universe means it can get away with this horror (*g*) more easily than book set in actual Victorian times. It still rubbed at me slightly, but the rest of it kept me going, so it worked.

The twist of adding actual scientific magic to the Victorian era works really well for me - it adds to the superstitious nature of the times, and chimes with what humans are capable of doing, and the ways we get it wrong so often, and sometimes in very frightening ways, so that there's a definite sense of peril in the story. Still worth reading - and I'm looking forward to the other books in the series being out in paper now! *g*

(Four books, any length, that you feel fit (the very broad definitions) of R.I.P. literature.)
Lord John and the Hand of Devils by Diana Gabaldon
The Bones of Avalon by Phil Rickman
The Magpie Lord by K.J. Charles