Now, in this story, Steven encounters Grace, a socially awkward perfumer whose unusually acute and highly trained sense of smell is central to the story. Obviously some of them got stopped seven are left and they’ve put themselves in service to the Temple of the Rat for various good reasons.

Steven, the paladin of the story, has this great backstory – his god died or at least disappeared, and all the holy berserkers that belonged to that order went crazy and started slaughtering everyone around them and couldn’t stop. Again, that’s good for me since I don’t personally like stories that descend too far into silliness. I like this because it’s one of the things that keeps the stories from being too silly.Ĭ) A clever plot that has enough unexpected moments to be fun.ĭ) Characters that add enough depth to keep the stories above the level of pure froth. It’s getting easier to see the similarity between the T Kingfisher who’s writing these fantasy romances and the T Kingfisher who wrote The Twisted Ones. A temple of holy lawyers is certainly an interesting twist on fantasy religions, I must say.Ī) Fun writing style, including more than a little tongue-in-cheek humor.ī) A thread of grotesque horror. The more immediate continuing villains in both books are the priests of the Motherhood, just as the Temple of the Rat God are the continuing good guys. Many more positive plot hooks too, like how about the two other sword-bound people and huh, I wonder if we’ll see Marguerite again, and how about the bird that screams curses in an inhumanly deep voice, and what did happen to Steven’s god anyway? Lots of little (and not-so-little) threads going off in many directions. Both? Neither? If Kingfisher introduces a brand-new magical threat in every installment, count this world out as a potential vacation spot, that’s for sure. Not sure which if either of those elements is going to be important later. those things that are responsible for the severed head problem. In Paladin’s Grace, we encounter a completely different such threat: those horrible. In the meantime, the world is getting cluttered! In Swordheart, we encounter one possible magical threat – those horrible parasite things in the woods – that is not really very important to the story at hand, but provides a plausible plot hook for the future.

A direct sequel is still on its way, we are assured, and that’s good to hear because I do want to go on with that other plotline. It’s not a direct sequel to the first (Swordheart), and an author’s note at the book explains that Kingfisher did mean to write a direct sequel, but got distracted by a different idea and wrote this one instead.

Okay, Paladin’s Grace is the second book in this low-stress fantasy romance series T Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon is writing.

Swordheart book