Witch King

2.5 stars, Metaphorosis Reviews

Summary
Powerful demon Kaiisteron and his companion witch, imprisoned in a tomb under the sea, are awakened by a mage with more ambition than caution. Once free, they find a close companion is missing, and their search for her whirls them into a complex political web with its roots in the past.

Review
I'm a big fan of Tamara Siler (Tambo) Jones' original Threads of Malice books, in part because they take place after an epic war between good and evil. Martha Wells tries to go that one better here, in a dual-threaded story both before and after a vital revolution against evil. Unfortunately, Wells does a frankly poor job of laying out all the complex politics; even at the end of the story, I had very little notion of who and what many of the key players were, and therefore no clear sense of the characters' motivations. A key theme, for example, is a renewal that involves both Imperial Blessed and Rising Earth. I still have no real idea of what any of those three things is or why it was meant to matter.

It looks as if the truth is that Wells is just an uneven writer. She clearly knows how to write engaging characters – her Murderbot books are about almost nothing but engagement, and they're generally speaking very strong. Here, however, she pulls back sharply from the characters, and the result is cold and distant. I understood the emotions of Kai, the protagonist, but I didn't really feel any of them. Much is left to us to infer (e.g., Kai's relationship with key figure Bashasa), and while I did so, it didn't mean much to me.

Wells also knows how to build intriguing worlds (as in her Raksura books), and does so again here, but not in any really coordinated manner. There are several different kinds of magic, and their nature and limitations are never really clear. We learn at the very start of the book about ‘pearls' that are placed (literally) in people's hearts, and that Kai has one. But we never learn what they do, how they work, or where Kai's came from. It's intriguing background, but most of it is never resolved, and only sometimes essential to the plot.

I've liked some of Wells' books quite a lot, and some much less. Unfortunately, Witch King falls in this latter category. It's an interesting sketch of a novel that could have been, but that never really developed.

I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review.