Touted as both a wildly original fantasy novel and a solid police procedural, I was crazily excited to read this book. My two favorite genres combined into one book!
Not really.
There’s only one scene—a magical autopsy that’s pretty cool—that’s anything like a police procedural. The book is structured more like a thriller than a mystery novel, as Sagara’s cop protagonist Kaylin Neeya more stumbles upon clues rather than uncovering them. Yes, down these mean streets a man must go who is neither tarnished nor afraid, and that’s totally Kaylin and her partners Severn and Tiamaris (a dragon who can turn into a humanoid figure. Totally fun!). And the tension between Kaylin and Severn ever-present in the novel’s substrata propels the emotion forward.
The world Sagara creates is vivid and dangerous, not at all reeking of The Lord of the Rings like many fantasy novels on the market (Eg: Terry Brooks’, R. A. Salvatore’s, and Margaret Wies and Tracy Hickman’s novels. If you don’t believe me, pick up five random books by different authors in the fantasy section at Borders and see what percentage have elves, orcs, and hobbit-like characters in them. It’s called “high fantasy” but I think it’s cheating. My sister tells me Sagara writes “high fantasy” as well.). But Sagara uses the first half of the novel to describe the world, not the develop the plot. Which makes the first two hundred pages—and believe me, you feel each of the two hundred—torture. Once you’ve made it through the first half, however, the plot flies and one will have I-just-can’t-put-it-down syndrome.
My sister tells me the series gets increasingly better as it goes, a lá Harry Potter, so I’ll probably read the next book. Yes, the second half of Cast in Shadow totally made up for the first half.
And, best of all, I can rate the novel PG for violence and occasional mild swearing! That doesn’t happen every day.
Four stars
****
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