Starlight’s Children – Darian Smith
Children are being hunted in the streets and their parents’ hearts frozen into glass. Brannon and his team of “unusual crimes” investigators are still reeling from the aftermath of Risen in Kalanon, but now they must face a new monster on the loose.
Tensions between Kalanon and Nilar are on the rise once more as Ylani and the King clash. Meanwhile, Taran’s past haunts him and the church may not be the sanctuary it once was. Monsters come in many forms and Taran knows this better than most. Once you’ve been a Child of Starlight, can you ever truly be free?
Failing to solve this new string of murders could cost the missing children their lives, Kalanon its future, and one of their team his sanity.
I’ll just say starting out: I usually don’t find that books as essentially good-hearted as this one have such a high body count. But it definitely is noblebright, not grimdark, despite that, and well written to boot.
I very much enjoyed the first book in the series, which introduced the mashup of police procedural, secondary-world fantasy, and forensic thriller that continues in this one. The lead investigator, a former soldier who’s trained as a physician in part as a way of atoning for the lives he took in the war, is intelligent, determined, and brave, and ably supported by a cast of secondary characters who manage to be morally complicated while still, mostly, people you can cheer for. Nobody is lily-white, but unlike in a grimdark fantasy, they haven’t given up on becoming better people, or lost hope that they can do what’s right.
The dialog and, to be honest, many of the social attitudes are modern rather than of the technological and social period of the setting, but that would be almost my only criticism. This is a good concept, well executed.
Disclosure: I received a review copy via SpecFicNZ, the writers’ organisation which the author and I both belong to, and we are acquainted in real life.
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.
