Sense and Sensability and Vampires

 Combining Books 2 and 3 of Philippe Boulle's Victorian Age Vampire trilogy into one review to save time and effort. 

Book 2, The Madness of Priests, enjoins us in Victoria and Regina travels to Paris, seeking the trail of her mother. We also spend time following Regina's father and her sort of fiance as they get variously involved in Kindred affairs, as well as get back to Beckett as he seeks information of Kemintiri, the thousand faced bride of Set. Oh yes, and Regina's best friend, who having watched her husband get murdered in book 1, winds up in a Sanitarium overseen by the Malkavian sheriff of North London. We also find out Mithras, the very very ancient Vampire Prince of London, is acting strangely, and he too gets locked in the Sanitarium by the end. 

Oh yes, and while in Paris, we meet Anatole, the Malkavian who becomes the Priest of Gehenna in the modern age. Here, he's running a rather infamous prison complex, perverting the proper rituals to suit vampires, all while luring in Regina and Victoria, who are in turn pursued by Regina's father and her fiancee. (The fiance is now under the control of the London Ventrue, but Dad's all wrapped up in the Society of Leopold, aka The Holy Inquisition.)

By the end, the stage is set for a trip to Hapsburg Vienna to find out why Regina's mother is so important to the Tremere.

 Which brings us to book 3, The Wounded King. We start in Vienna, as Regina has been turned into a Vampire by Victoria. Regina's father and fiancee also arrive, and again hook up with the Society while Regina and Victoria try to get an audience with the Tremere. It gets rather ugly, as Dad winds up dead, the fiance's best friend gets eaten by another vampire, Beckett runs off with Mom, Regina nd Victoria start arguing, and eventually we all wind up back in London and County Durham for a finale that involves a bunch of Thaumaturgy, the reveal of Keminitri, a Revanant family under Tremere control, and a bunch of ugly. Suffice it to say, no one winds up happy by the end. 

While it was nice to finally finish these after nearly 20 years, I still feel a bit like the main purpose was to hide cameos of the "Signature Characters" from the Dark Ages and Modern Clannovels in another era. On the other hand, with Hesha, we get a better look at the beliefs of the Settites (now The Ministry in 5th Edition) and how it can be reflected in every day things.

Pride and Predjudice and Vampires

 So, I was looking through my library, and found Philippe Boulle's A Morbid Initiation (Book 1 in the Victorian Age Vampire trilogy) sitting there reminding me I bought the first two books years ago and never read them. (To be fair, I started reading this one and gave up after a few chapters. Mind you, some of that was me being annoyed with the Revised Edition, some of it was the fact it takes forever before any vampires actually reveal themselves...) 

Anyway, much like the Clan Novels, this second attempt fared better. We spend much of book 1 focused on one Regina Blake, daughter of Lord Blake and Lady Emma. The family has moved back from British Cairo to outside London due to Lady Emma's illness. Emma dies, her family shows up, and they act very strangely. In the meantime, Victoria Ash shows up at the funeral, having been a friend to Emma in the past. (Indeed, Miss Ash walks in on Regina almost consummating her relationship with Malcolm Seward, one of her father's loyal soldiers.)

Urgh. Anyway, most of the book concerns Regina getting involved in Victorian Era Kindred intrigues as she tries to figure out why her mother's sarcophagus is empty, why her cousins seem to have fast healing, and why her presumed fiance killed her after ravishing her while she work a bull mask.

We also have Beckett escaping London and meeting up with Hesha, although the plot is pretty much a side note in the interludes. 

It's fun reading, once you get into it, although it takes its good sweet time getting going. People familiar with the signature characters from the Revised edition will probably get a kick out of the cameos made by people focused on in the Clan Novels, although likely people with no knowledge of the Vampire RPG will be as lost as poor Regina.

Meet cute and haunt

 So, as I was perusing my shelves for something I haven't read recently while I wait for library holds to arrive, I found Better Homes and Hauntings by Molly Harper lingering unobtrusively on one of my shelves. I have no idea where I got this from. There are no library stamps or barcodes, no price tags affixed to the UPC... We'll just assume it was a gift of the collection Gods and run with it. 

Which is a good thing, since it turned out to be a fun yarn that proved women can be just as pop culturally geeky as men. We open on Nina, a who runs a landscaping business in Rhode Island, arriving at Crane's Rest, an estate granted by the governor on a spit of land/island a ferry's ride away from Newport. Nina is accompanied by Cindy, the interior organizer, and her employer's best friend, Jake, who is doing the architectural design as part of the restoration. Her boss, Deacon Whitley, runs EyeDee, a Facebook style company he founded after graduating from Harvard. Problem is, the estate is haunted, and the Whitley family is cursed, all because of the unsolved murder of his great grandmother Catherine, presumably at the hands of his great grandfather Gerald. Part of the process involves everyone living on the island during the renovation, despite the fact the work crews have a tendency to get spooked by cold spots and phantom bodies appearing on the widow's walk.

Since this is light paranormal romance, we get various combinations as the couples work through their various issues on the way to couplehood, but we also get ghostly visitations, visions, and a mystery as to what happened and WHY.

It wound up being very entertaining and readable, and I'm sad that this seems to be a stand alone novel, since I'd love to read more about these characters.

Kind of surprised the Sacred Timeline hasn't been destroyed at this point

 So, Dragons of Eternity showed up right after I finished the second volume up, so yay!

Let me start this by saying this volume is much better balanced than the previous installments. Again, we're dealing with time travel in a fantasy setting, which tends to get a bit confusing, particularly since the "present" setting is mostly unaffected by changes further in the past, with a caveat that the River of Time doesn't rise at all once, thus with one setting being roughly 5 years prior, and another 5 centuries prior (or so)...

On the other hand, it's a great opportunity for fan service, as Tanis ends up getting sent back to the dawn of the War of the Lance in the "Chaos Timeline" to serve as bait while Destina and Brother Kairn travel back to the Third Dragon War to try to fix what they screwed up in the last volume. 

Which means, we get treated to re-imagined moments from the first ever book in the entire series as Tanis and the original Heroes of the Lance meet at the Inn of the Last Home on the night Riverwind and Goldmoon show up with the Blue Crystal Staff, only this time in a world where Takhisis won the Third Dragon War and the other Gods are now returning to try to free the world. 

There are some really great moments in there, like Tasslehoff bludgeoning Flint with the Blue Crystal Staff to cure him of his heart problems and Fizban being Fizban. There are some really confusing moments, since going back to a period where you were alive replaces that you with current you, or the fact that the return to the Third Dragon War suggests that people who traveled there in book 2 aren't there when two others return to the period. There are also a few WTF moments in there, like when Chaos Time Caramon winds up hitching a ride with Zeboim to get to the High Clerist's Tower. 

They do leave the timeline opened ended, since Dalamar has foreseen the Chaos War and the "5th Age", although it's never quite defined if it will still come to pass by the end of this.

Honestly though, something Raistlin says partway through helps, about how even if they have no memories of what happened in the alternate timelines, their hearts will remember, which does better explain how the Companions managed to work together long enough to win the war. 

While I understand the current owners of the setting have no interest in publishing novels, this will likely be the end of the saga for a while. And it is a pretty good place to end.

One would think high fantasy wouldn't involve so much time travel

 Thanks to goodreads, I found out books 2 and 3 of the DragonLance Destinies Trilogy had been released. Which was mildly annoying, since I missed it. Anyway, just finished Dragons of Fate, which is book 2, with book three arriving at the library this afternoon. 

When we left off, Destina (a new character from the era post Legends but prior to 5th Age) had taken her current iteration of Tasslehoff back in time to to the night when the entire series started and took Raistlin and Sturm back further in time to the end of the 3rd Dragon War. Issue, of course being that with both a Kender and The Greygem (which holds Chaos), time can be changed, as Raistlin learned the hard way in Legends. 

Ugh. so, This younger version of Sturm meets Huma and Raistlin meet Magius, and Detina dn Tasslehoff get invol;ved in their own escapades in the past. In the 'present', Dalamar and Justinius seek to repair the Device of Time Traveling which broke during the trip back to Huma. Which in turn allows the authors to highlight how artificers work in the DragonLance setting, much like 5th Age brought sorcery into the Wizarding world. Of course, Tas winds up meeting the Gnomes of the era....

Anyway, this one, much like volume one, ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, as the Butterfly effect comes into play based on one action. 

While I enjoyed this one more than the first volume (among other things, the pacing is a lot better), and I enjoy watching Raistlin and Sturm gain an understanding of each other they never had in prior outings, it still feels a bit like the balance between pathos and comedy is a bit off here. I mean, Tas by himself is hysterical, but it just doesn't seem as meshed in with the meat of the story. Still worth reading for fans of the Lance.