The Queen of Swords
9.0
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1720. Escaping the gallows, Anne Bonny, the infamous pirate queen, sets sail in search of a fabulous...
Relentless
Book
Disappearing intelligence analysts lead the Gray Man deep into a conspiracy in the latest explosive...
The Roswell Conspiracy
8.0
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1947 Ten-year-old Fay Allen of Roswell, New Mexico, witnesses the fiery crash of an extraordinary...
Rebirth (Awakened Fate #6)
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One summer later… Ari Moreau knows all about mermaids, but they’ve never heard of people like...
mermaid fantasy paranormal romance young adult ya
True Fiction
10.0
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When a passenger jet crashes onto the beaches of Waikiki, bestselling thriller writer Ian Ludlow...
Kingsbane
Book
When assassins ambush her best friend, Rielle Dardenne risks everything to save him, exposing...
Impetuous Valor (Alsaunce)
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Jonas finishes his training and becomes the Guardian of the heir to the throne of Alsaunce. He is...
historical fiction
Knuckledust (2020)
4.0
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When a special police task force kick open the doors of elite underground fight den - Club...
Ross (3284 KP) rated Age of Assassins in Books
Feb 5, 2018
I had no real expectations of this other than people rated it highly (which tends to make me more critical).
The premise was a little unusual for me - a detective thriller but in a fantasy setting. A young assassin in training, Girton, and his master are hired to find who hired another assassin to kill the heir to the throne. They then work undercover to determine who had the motive to kill the obnoxious heir. Girton becomes embedded within the squires and starts to see what a real childhood would have been like, growing up with other children rather than his master. His emotional frailty, alongside how hard he has to try not to kill them all and show how much more skilled he is than the bumbling, club-footed oaf he is presumed to be.
The plot itself is pretty much all revealed at the end with a Poirot-esque "I suppose you're wondering why I asked you all here" chapter, which I thought was a bit of a cop-out, more could have been hinted at along the way. Rather than the whole plot being revealed in a oner, people like to have enough to stitch it all together and I felt it maybe kept a little too much in the tank for the final scene.
I enjoyed it as a fantasy novel, though its scope was so much smaller than other books I have read recently, though the action scenes were well narrated.
As a detective novel, I thought it left a little too much of the reveal to the end and didn't reveal enough along the way.
The Painted Queen
Elizabeth Peters and Joan Hess
Book
Egypt, 1912—Amelia Peabody and her dashing archeologist husband, Radcliffe Emerson, are once...