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Emissary
Book Two of The Percheron Saga

by Fiona McIntosh



      If you have read Odalisque (also reviewed on this site) then you will know all about the land of Percheron, an Arabian Nights style place filled with harems, eunuchs, cruel laws and plenty of torture. Ana is now an odalisque herself, and wishes that she were anywhere else. Lazar is dead but he won’t lie down, he just lies low. Young Boaz is the all-powerful Zar, aided and abetted by his villainous mother, the Grand Master Eunuch and a demon masquerading as the Grand Vizier. But Percheron has an enemy, the land of Galinsea whose crown prince Lucien was killed by the Percherese. Somebody has to be the eponymous emissary and go to Galinsea to negotiate peace, but the only person suitable has some rather pressing reasons for not being able to go...

I’ve been a fan of this type of thing since early childhood, but I confess to finding this middle volume to be... a typical middle volume. In short, we know about the Percherese already, and the characters are just doing what they were doing in the first book. The Galinseans are a welcome change from the hothouse environment of the harem, and there are a few heart-stopping moments and plenty of gore to keep the pages turning so maybe I am being a little hard. I still wonder whether Boaz the new Zar could possibly have intervened more often when other people were committing crimes against humanity in his name, and if the Percherese are so religious why don’t we hear more about this? This is still entertaining, but there could be more that is new and surprising in here that we didn’t already encounter in the first book.

The Book

Orbit (Little, Brown)
January 2008
Paperback
9781841494616
Fantasy / Fantastic Location
More at Amazon.com US || UK
Excerpt
NOTE: Torture and rape
US edition is different

The Reviewer

Rachel A Hyde
Reviewed 2008
NOTE:
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