marycrawford | Wizard Hunters by Martha Wells - free book giveaway and review (Reply)

marthawells is giving away ten signed copies of Wizard Hunters, the first book in her Ile-Rien trilogy. She says:

"Right now there are 51 entries, so the chances aren't bad.

To enter, send an email between now and February 15 to WebAdmin @ marthawells.com saying you want to be in the contest. (Only one entry per person, please, even if like me you have about ten different email addresses.) On the 16th of February, I'll put all the entries in a hat and pull out ten winners. The winners will need to email me their mailing address so I can ship them the books. And overseas entries are fine."

I love this trilogy, and the only reason I'm not entering the giveaway is that I have a hardback copy. Go enter!

That's all I was going to say, but now I find I have to talk about the book a bit, even though I usually worry too much about whether I'm doing a book justice to even attempt a review.

I find Wizard Hunters riveting, and yes, it's the first part of a fantasy trilogy but it's a strong book all on its own - this is not one of those trilogies where the main character slowly acquires a telepathic horse, a quest and an adorable sidekick and sets off for adventure on the last page of book one, leaving you to grind your teeth and hurl the book against the wall.

Tremaine Valiarde doesn't have a horse, a quest or an adorable anything; she gets by on a gun, her wits and a bar of chocolate. I fell for her immediately. She's sarcastic, pessimistic, clever and unconventional, her character shaped by her unusual upbringing, and she lives in a wartorn world whose technology level is close to our own - early '20s, say - and where scholars of magic perform their experiments to try and stop the war. One of those experiments sucks Tremaine and several of those sorcerer-scholars into another world, a seemingly primitive one where sorcerers are inherently evil and must be hunted and exterminated. The first people she meets, Ilias and Giliead, are the wizard hunters in the title, and the clash and mesh of cultures as they fight their common enemy is a strong thread in all three books.

Ilias and Giliead are great characters in their own right, foster-brothers who have spent their lives dealing with rogue sorcerers and their curses, with a painful, strong history together that is slowly revealed during the trilogy. I can't say how pleased I am that Giliead and Ilias are returning in several prequel stories in the magazine Black Gate; I was really disappointed that there isn't going to be a whole prequel novel.

I always want quotes in reviews, to see what the author's writing is like, and I'm going to quote the very opening of the book here, because it sucked me in immediately and I think it gives a good feel for the book as a whole.

It was nine o'clock at night and Tremaine was trying to find a way to kill herself that would bring in a verdict of natural causes in court, when someone banged on the door.

"Oh, damn." A couple of books on poisons slid out of her lap as she struggled out of the overstuffed armchair. She managed to hold on to the second volume of Medical Jurisprudence, closing it over her fingers to mark her place. The search for the elusive untraceable poison was not going well; there were too many ways sorcerer-physicians could uncover such things and she didn't want it to look as if she had been murdered. Intracranial hemorrhage seemed a good possibility, if a little difficult to arrange on one's own. But I'm a Valiarde, I should be able to figure this out, she thought sourly. Dragging the blanket around her, she picked her way through the piles of books to the door. The library at Coldcourt was ideal for this, being large, eclectic and packed with every book, treatise, and monograph on murder and mayhem available to the civilized world.

The entry hall was dark except for one single electric bulb burning in the converted gas fixture above the sweep of the stairs. The light fell on yellowed plaster walls and rich old wood and a blue and gold patterned carpet on polished stone tile. Coldcourt was aptly named and Tremaine's bare feet were half- frozen by the time she made it to the front door. She had let the housekeeper have the night off and now she regretted it, but she had had no idea it would take this long to arrange things. At this rate she wouldn't be dead until next week.

You can read the first five chapters of Wizard Hunters online, here.