Robert N. Charrette's Choose Your Enemies Carefully picks up the tale of Twist/Sam and his search for his sister a few years after the events detailed in the first book of Secrets of Power. Although this time, we actually get to meet Janice, the goblinized sister. Indeed, she gets rescued from the Yomi walled neighborhood in Hong Kong in the first chapter. We gets glimpses of her as she works with another of her kind (implied heavily to be an orc or troll, although the big reveal at the end proves that assumption wrong), as she moves around the world.
Her brother Sam, aka Twist, on the other hand is trying to raise money to go rescue her from Yomi, proving again to be an ethical Shadowrunner. He does wind up getting sucked into the books main plot through deceit by the people he cares about, winding up in England, dealing with a Circle of Druids trying to oust the Elves of Tir, which used to be Ireland. Said Druids first attempt recreates an old Christopher Lee movie (I'm ignoring Nic Cage's remake; this book predates it, plus no one is screaming about bees), then morphs into something else.
By the end, Sam/Twist has dealt with betrayal from both Dodger, his hetero husband; and Hart, who was trying to kill him in the last book, and is now his side piece overseas. At the very end, after all the ugly chains of story resolve and we find out who all has been using everyone else throughout, we watch as Sam and Janice reunite briefly, and the consequences thereof, which will likely be one of the plot threads in the finale.
While this book was not quite as readable as the first volume, it remained a pleasant experience. I mean, we're watching someone who's essentially a pawn learn to move outside of his programmed parameters, and how his relationship with his Dog totem is making him more of a Shaman of Justice more than anything else.I'll be interested to see how everything works out.
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