Nocturnal Book Reviews

First of all, the writing style reminded me strongly of Lilith Saintcrow because it pushed the heroine constantly to the limits of her endurance. More than once I wondered how Lila will come out of the impossible situations she was getting into... and she did come out swinging, although not without heavy repercussions.

Lila was a fascinating woman, broken, empty, cold, feeling worthless because after being tortured and damaged beyond repair as a human being she was turned into a cyborg, a perfect multi billion machine which is constantly poked and probed and experimented with. No wonder the woman felt sub-human and unworthy of reconnection with her old life.

Her first real life task is to guard a famous rock-star elf Zal who keeps receiving death threats from other elves. The human intelligence service suspects that Zal who always was a rebel is supposed to fulfil some sort of elven prophecy, and elven community which wants to separate itself from the rest of the worlds tries to stop it from happening by eliminating Zal.

Zal and Lila accidentally start a Game when they first see each other. Game is something that can happen with all the otherworlders, it's like a magical power that catches us making promises or refusing to do something or making a deal and forces us to adhere to the stakes until the Game is played out. It's complicated ad intricate like everything else in this book :)

Actually, expect to be constantly puzzled and awed by the depth of world-building and meticulous details in the series. Sometimes I was thinking "no way it could get more complicated", and sure as hell I would turn the page and find out something else that would change my perception of the world.

This is the only drawback of the series, sometimes it feels too much and you start developing a headache trying to cope with the onslaught of the information, otherwise it's action driven and rich multi faceted story, a rare mix of sci-fi and fantasy, which strongly reminded me of popular animated series Final Fantasy.

Recommended with reservations.