I have recently got back into reading this smart, cleverly written, Brit-based urban fantasy, featuring divination mage Alex Verus, after enjoying this series over a number of years – read my reviews of Fated, Veiled, Burned, Bound and Fallen. So I was delighted to be approved to read the new release of the penultimate adventure planned for this series – Forged.
BLURB: To protect his friends, Mage Alex Verus has had to change–and embrace his dark side. But the life mage Anne has changed too, and made a bond with a dangerous power. She’s going after everyone she’s got a grudge against–and it’s a long list. In the meantime, Alex has to deal with his arch-enemy, Levistus. The Council’s death squads are hunting Alex as well as Anne, and the only way for Alex to stop them is to end his long war with Levistus and the Council, by whatever means necessary. It will take everything Alex has to stay a step ahead of the Council and stop Anne from letting the world burn.
REVIEW: I only recently finished reading Fallen, so had no problem picking up the action which continues straight on from the previous book. Alex, after being subjected to an intolerable choice in the previous book, took a fateful decision which has very much altered his view on things.
There is a lot of action in this book – as The Council goes on hunting for him, Alex ends up in a series of confrontations. The battles are done very well – Jacka writes the action and Alex’s reaction to it throughout without any loss of pace, the fight scenes between battling mages grippingly portrayed. But this book is, necessarily, quite a lot darker and I missed some of the characters who used to provide some light relief. They are much less in evidence as the pace is more relentless and the stakes go on rising.
However, I’m glad that despite all the killing, there is no sense that people’s lives don’t matter. We end up being a bit appalled at the violence, because we are alongside Verus, who is also affected by the trail of destruction left in his wake. There is a defining battle near the end of the book that I found particularly poignant, in amongst all the chaos and mayhem. Especially if you compare the main antagonist with a version of themselves only a couple of books earlier… As ever, Jacka wraps up the ongoing problem within this story so I wasn’t left feeling unsatisfied with the ending. Though there are a couple of massive plotpoints still waving in the wind…
I am looking forward to the next, final book, where all these issues will be satisfactorily concluded. And I’m crossing my fingers – and toes – that at least a couple of the main characters, as well as Verus, will emerge relatively unscathed. Which surely tells you how invested I’ve become in the narrative arcs of the protagonist and his followers while following their fortunes throughout this tumultuous and well-crafted series. While I obtained an arc of Forged from Netgalley, the opinions I have expressed are unbiased and my own.
8/10
Brainfluff 