When retired Erdemen army officer Kemen Sendoa helped the young prince Hakan Ithel reclaim his throne, he thought he was happy. He had shaped the future of his beloved country and earned a place of honor and respect.
In the shelter of the palace, he finds peace and the promise of a life he’d only imagined. Yet his own choices, and brewing border troubles, may force him to make a final sacrifice.
A tale of love, honor, and forgiveness, A Cold Wind follows The King’s Sword in the Erdemen Honor series.
I enjoyed the first book in this series, and, as I predicted, this one is better. I found it emotionally moving more than once, which doesn’t happen often. It has two threads to it: a romance plot, and what can’t quite be called an adventure plot because it’s deliberately not high-action or fast-paced (and, to me, is none the worse for that).
The two would-be lovers, kept apart by their lack of self-confidence and their inability to communicate, were wonderfully depicted, and the matter-of-fact courage of the hero continues to make him admirable.
I did feel that the early part of the book could have been tighter, and found Riona’s unpleasant suitor a little too obviously inserted to make a point; I thought that subplot could have been polished further overall. In the main, though, this is a fine piece of writing, and I’m looking forward to the next one.
This book review is by Mike Reeves-McMillan and originally appeared on Goodreads.. Mike writes the Gryphon Clerks novels, a series featuring heroic civil servants and engineers doing their best in a difficult world; the Auckland Allies contemporary urban fantasy series, about underpowered magical practitioners stepping up to defend their city when nobody else will; and the Hand of the Trickster sword-and-sorcery series, in which a servant of the trickster god exalts the humble and humbles the exalted. His short stories have appeared in a number of professional and semiprofessional venues, including the Terry Pratchett tribute anthology In Memory.
