A Killer and a King

Wow. Dumbrell offers up his best novel yet, taking everything he learned while crafting the Pillars of Peace trilogy, and improving on every level.

The novel begins with the author crafting up another signature world that feels both fantasy, and historical. The Cadraelian Kingdom has been expanding its borders for years, the men are weary, and some call for an end to the war. However, that has left the unconquered lands at the kingdom’s borders that much more uneasy. This new world is filled with more than names, there are hints of backstory, battle name drops, historical references, and old wounds. The author’s ability to create more than one world that feels full and lush and real is immensely impressive to me. And his ability to name things that just sound right is uncanny.

Inside this world, the author has crafted another unbelievable cast of characters, and this time, there’s an awful lot of them. A royal family, the king’s ministry of six, love interests, bordering leaders, and so much more. They’re dynamic, multilayered with heart, pride, fear, anger, and corruption. This is a very dialogue forward novel, as you will find with many mystery elements, and the author handles it all with a deft hand that will keep you turning pages long after you were supposed to go to sleep.

The character of Prince Leander, while certainly less than faultless, is crafted in such a way as to rival even that of Cyrus from the Pillars of Peace. While Cyrus is memorable in his purity and goodness, Leander is built from the ground up with the thought of an overbearing, quick-to-anger, and quick to drink, King of a father in mind. Therefore his imperfections ring as real, fleshed out character traits. Heavy is the head that’ll wear the crown, and this heir just might meet his fair share of pitfalls.

As readers will see from the acknowledgments, the author sought to create a fantasy world and then mesh it with the murder mystery genre most commonly dominated by the queen of mystery herself, Agatha Christie. And while I’m no expert, I certainly have quite a bit of experience with both fantasy worlds, and the works of Christie. Having just finished now, one of the most impressive things to me is that while the book was starting out, I thought the author was spending time to grow his vision for his world. And while it’s true he was, he was also already sowing the seeds for what was to come, dropping hints and clues along the way, from the very beginning. It takes a particular set of skills to know where you’re heading while still building the basis for your characters’ existence, and Dumbrell smashed it.

One thing that tends to worry me about the fantasy/mystery blend is that when it includes certain types of action, the deaths can kind of just feel like an addition to the body count, whereas in a mystery, death is not a common occurrence, and therefore it’s jarring and startles the reader. While the author references war and violence, it does not actually take place within this story, therefore subverting the typical issue, and making the murder mystery gruesome and out of place even in a royal palace.

And while there are hints of a more graphic nature, the deaths that follow certainly earn a stamp of approval in the arena of Christie mystery writing. And without spoiling, the author also does a fantastic job of injecting Christie into a powerful twist with a very surprising turnaround. And much like a Christie ending, no one leaves the novel unscathed.

…There is also a man with a mustache and cane…how could there not be???

Another smash hit release to tell your moms, dads, daddies, and even unborn nephews about. Really feels like a natural evolution for the author, almost as if the small snippet of the King’s poisoning from The Look of a King was expanded into its own story. Very well done.

“Inaction is action’s more dangerous sibling.”