Just Finished Reading: The Devil’s Looking Glass by Mark Chadbourn (FP: 2012)

England, 1593. Court astrologer and (quite possibly insane) wise man Dr Dee has been kidnapped in an act of desperation by Irish spy Red Meg. Without him in place the magical defences protecting the realm begin the fail. Once secure from the Unseelie Court even Queen Elizabeth herself is vulnerable to attack. Sent to retrieve him at all costs is England’s greatest spy Will Swyfte. But Will has his own agenda which may put the country he loves in even greater peril. For Will has learnt that Dee intends to travel to the New World – a place of great mystery, great opportunity and even greater terror – where the Fey hold court and plan the destruction of humankind. If Will and his friends can stay one step behind Dee they could do uncounted damage to the plans of the Fay and, more importantly, recover the woman Will loves stolen from him over a decade ago and taken away to a land far more foreign than anything imagined by mere humans. Will is willing to chance everything, his life, his friends, and his country, for the opportunity to see Jenny one last time before he dies. But can even the greatest agent of the age stand against the supernatural armies who face him. Will a sword, a pistol and natural intelligence be enough against a race that has plagued mankind since the very first days and what if he fails and darkness falls – for ever.

This was the third and last instalment in the Swords of Albion series. Unfortunately it was also, I believe, the weakest of the three. All of the elements I enjoyed so much in the first two novels were there but something I felt was missing. There was a breathless pace to it but the regular as clockwork cliff-hangers started to grate after a while. No matter what the problem, with many pages to go, you just knew that something would turn up to save the day and, just as regularly it did. There was a ‘creep’ factor especially when the Fey began their attack on London but the long section in the New World went on too long and just wasn’t weird enough to add much tension. It’s hard to put my finger on it except to say that this volume didn’t really have the “heart” of the other two. Maybe it was because it was the last book and many of the threads had to be tied up neatly? This is not to say that this was a bad book or even a poor fantasy novel. It was, at the very least, a more than reasonable read and often head and shoulders above some of the previous fantasy novels reviewed here. It was a credible ending to a very good trilogy but instead of, as I had hoped, going out with a bang left me thinking more fizzle than boom. Reasonable, but I’d definitely start the series in sequence rather than jumping in at the end. More fantasy to come as I feel it’s a neglected genre in my life.