Like all Mancour’s Spellmonger novels, Shadowmage: Book Nine Of The Spellmonger Series by Terry Mancour is entertaining, engaging, lots of fun with a fast moving plot, complex villains and earnest heroes. This time we join journeymen Tyndal and Rondal who decide to pursue their knightly quest to rid the world of the Rat Brotherhood thieves, extortionists, slavers, kidnappers, murderers, etc., etc., etc. The Rats aren’t too keen on being done away with and are highly decentralized, making it difficult to do more than annoy them with any one assault.
Of course Tyndal and Rondal find a way, along with helping Alshar’s Orphan Duke Anguin, make lots of money and yes, kill a dragon. The book ends with us once more reintroduced to the real villains in the Spellmonger’s world, the fanatical followers of Sheol and Korbol, the undead, necromantic folk who hate humans.
The two young knights are interesting characters who feel somewhat real – albeit a little too good to be true at surviving impossible odds – and we meet a couple new characters, noble sibling shadowmages Atopol and Gatina. Gatina adds a sour note to the story. She is 14 and looking for a husband. Per her family’s rules she must find someone as perfect and as daring as possible and she settles on Rondal. Rondal isn’t too sure he wants to be settled on and finds Gatina’s remorseless hunt a bit unsettling, but like most teenage boys he’s also not going to look too askew at a pretty girl.
Even allowing for the medieval backdrop of the story I found it jarring to read about a 14 year old seriously contemplating marriage. Today we call someone like that jail bait and her father would have more than a warning! I found her too obsessive to be real, plus far too good at sneaking around and stealing stuff and predict she will cause problems in the future for the Spellmonger gang, much like Isily.
Mancour creates an unusual world with plenty of magic, good guys and villains, political intrigue and interpersonal problems. The world in Shadowmage was slightly less detailed and the action a little harder to follow. Mancour includes maps but they are hard to read in the E format and I wasn’t able to ground myself in the territory. His characters jump all over the place, which adds speed to their actions and to the plot – and avoids describing endless marches – and that jumping actually made it a little easier. I just didn’t worry about where the different towns were.
I was wondering how well I’d recall the characters and plot of the prior novels because it’s been a couple of years. It’s a tribute to Mancour’s vivid world and people that I had very little problem keeping people straight. The novel runs in parallel with books seven and eight.
Spellmonger Minalan plays a small role in Shadowmage, which I missed. He is by far my favorite character in the series, resourceful, smart, not overly greedy or too ambitious and wary as heck of the Castalan spy queen! I hope he has a larger part in book 10.
Overall the story is very good. The medieval-style drawings of cats and rats and nobles and dragons are charming and add a piquant note. I enlarged each one to take a good look. Unfortunately the copy editor needs to learn something about homonyms, spelling, grammar, copy/pasting. The Amazon credits mention the editor, but all I can say is the book must have been a muddy mess originally if it is still this bad after editing. Some of the other Spellmonger novels are so poorly edited they are hard to follow; Shadowmage is not that bad although a few places we readers have to assume the author simply forgot words “not” or “no”.
Shadowmage was one of the 500+ books I lost (along with the first eight Spellmonger novels) when I sold my business. I was glad to use my Kindle Unlimited account to borrow instead of buy this time.
4 Stars
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