Paladin's Grace

4.5 stars. This was exactly the kind of read I needed right now. It's a light hearted fantasy-mystery-romance-humour kind of thing and manages to create pretty compelling characters and factions within the world for something that doesn't take itself too seriously.

The prologue made me wonder if it was going to be another heavy and grim fantasy because goodness knows I've read quite a lot of that already this month. Then as we got into the story proper, the elements of humour popped up fast and furious, and I fell in love with Kingfisher's writing pretty quickly.

What really worked for this book was how endearing its characters became very quickly. Stephen had me as a knight-paladin working on his guilt complex at the same time as his knitit g hobby, Istvan (I'm still working on remembering how to spell his name) got me with that stupid conversation he had with Stephen on how creatively they could turn decorations into weapons at a boring social event, Bishop Beartongue was a sassy queen, Grace was relatable with her “oh god oh god I'm messing this up aren't I” inner soliloquy, and Marguerite was just downright the most intriguing of the lot.

The mystery in itself wasn't too difficult to guess and wasn't crazy plot-twisty but packed sufficient punch to avoid falling flat. This book in itself zooms in on some “smaller” problems but I've a feeling that as the trilogy progresses, we're going to be confronting higher and higher level layers of plot - which is great as far as I'm concerned!

One of the more enjoyable and engaging reads I've had in a while.