Emberclaw

Ah, at last. It has been a couple of years, but here we are again with Arcady and Everen. At the end of Dragonfall, their relationship had hit rock bottom, and Everen was back in the dragon realm once more, but you can’t keep a good romance plot down so we all knew they would be back together in book 2.

To begin with, things don’t look good. Everen has been imprisoned by his mother, the dragon Queen, who still has plans to conquer the human world. He has even been stripped of his surname, which is the Emberclaw of the title. You might be forgiven for thinking that this book would be all about him. But it isn’t, it is about Arcady and Sorin.

Back in the human world, Arcady has achieved his ambition of gaining entrance to the university, where he hopes to learn enough to clear his grandfather’s name. But Magnes, the High Priest of the Order of the Dragons, is onto him. Sorin, the assassin, has been sent to the university as a student to keep an eye on Arcady.

While Dragonfall was very much a heist story, Emberclaw is a student contest tale. In order to trap Arcady and Everen, Magnes arranges for a contest amongst the students with a prize that Arcady can’t ignore. Sorin must enter as well, and through the course of the trials their relationship will evolve. And eventually Arcady will have to call Everen back.

This being a university, there must be other students. There are two key characters. Firstly there is Erin, a wealthy and uber-competent girl whom everyone loves and everyone expects to win. And then there is Willem, also absurdly wealthy, but competent only at being the life and soul of every party, and getting outrageously drunk. Fortunately one of his mothers is the professor of alchemy and he has access to good hangover cures, but he knows that he is destined to fail upwards for the rest of his life, and be roundly detested because of it.

Eventually, of course, Arcady will learn the truth about his grandfather and the terrible plague he is said to have caused. Sorin will learn the truth about Magnes and how he has manipulated her. And Everen will return to the human world so that there can be much enthusiastic gay sex with Arcady.

And so they all lived happily ever after. Which seems a bit of a shame. Was all that global politics stuff in book 1 just idle worldbuilding? Well maybe not. The publicity when the series was first bought promised that it would be a trilogy. I said as much in my review of Dragonfall. Emberclaw appears to have a very clear ending. But apparently there is a third book to come, and I have no idea what to expect. At the end of the second book of a trilogy, that’s rather unusual, and exciting.

Title: Emberclaw
By: L R Lam
Publisher:
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura