Set around 30 years after The Death of the Necromancer, The Wizard Hunters begins with our heroine, Tremaine Valiarde, trying to think of a way to kill herself. But she can’t just die any way, it has to look like an accident. Being raised by an emotionally distant (I believe Tremaine refers to him as “emotionally dead” at one point) master criminal and an opium addicted mage apparently has an interesting affect on people.
The plot of this is almost a straight pulp adventure retold as fantasy. In an Ile-Rien that resembles 1920s-30s Europe, Tremaine, the daughter of the anti-heroes of DotN is a playwright who seems ill-suited to be the heir to such adventurous (and amoral) people, and is something of a flighty (and rich) playwright. Even though she has no magic herself, she does have a sphere that seems to have magical powers, and which eventually causes Tremaine and her friends to be transported to another world, which they soon learn is the home of the Gardier, a force that is invading Ile-Rien. There, Tremaine begins to suspect that her father, Nicholas, and uncle, Arisilde, may not actually be dead.
The plot can be repetitive-people are regularly being captured and rescued, and then off to rescue someone else-but that’s fairly fitting for the pulp adventures it seems to be loosely based on, and Tremaine herself is great fun. In theory, I really like characters who come from adventurous, sometimes notorious, families, but who aren’t cut from the same cloth and don’t really want that life for themselves, but often the character comes off as whiny, and you don’t get why they don’t appreciate their family more. Thankfully, that isn’t the case with Tremaine, who fluctuates between the nice, flighty artist and the ruthless adventurer with a morbid sense of humor. I mean, really, who would want to grow up to be Nicholas? For that matter, who can blame someone who was raised by Nicholas for growing up to be a bit batty? The man probably arranged for bad things to happen to boys who pulled her hair when she was five. Tremaine’s friends are also quite fun. I’m especially fond of Ilias. Granted, he’s not much more than Tremaine’s muscle so far, but he’s her very effective muscle who lets her know when she’s starting to get a little too caught up in the whole adventuring thing.
I find that I like the memory of Nicholas as the vengeful husband and over-protective father more than I like Nicholas himself. If it makes sense, I probably would have liked him more if I’d read DotN after the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy, but I probably would have been lost here without it.
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rachelmanija(Rachel M. Brown) and