Shadow's Son (Shadow Saga) - Softcover

Sprunk, Jon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1616142014 ISBN 13: 9781616142018

Publisher: Pyr, 2010

Synopsis

In the holy city of Othir, treachery and corruption lurk at the end of every street, just the place for a freelance assassin with no loyalties and few scruples. Caim makes his living on the edge of a blade, but when a routine job goes south, he is thrust into the middle of an insidious plot. Pitted against crooked lawmen, rival killers, and sorcery from the Other Side, his only allies are Josephine, the socialite daughter of his last target, and Kit, a guardian spirit no one else can see. In this fight for his life, Caim only trusts his knives and his instincts, but they won’t be enough when his quest for justice leads him from Othir’s hazardous back alleys to its shining corridors of power. To unmask a conspiracy at the heart of the empire, he must claim his birthright as the Shadow’s Son. . . .

About this title

About the Author

Jon Sprunk is the author of Shadow's Son. He lives in central Pennsylvania with his wife and son. When not writing, he enjoys travel, collecting medieval and ancient weaponry, and pro football. Visit him online at www.jonsprunk.com, on Facebook (JonSprunkAuthor), or on Twitter (jsprunk70).

Reviews

Sprunk's debut novel, filled with the clichés and conventions of heroic fantasy, is amateur in its originality. Caim is an assassin with a tragic and slightly mysterious background. Othir is Caim's adopted city, a city populated entirely by villains and victims. Betrayed by his colleagues, Caim is left with Josephine, the daughter of the man who was to be Caim's next victim, as an unwilling ally against hosts of conniving religious fanatics, conspirators, and evil rival assassins. Sprunk's prose is leaden and riddled with lumps of tedious exposition, his characters are prototypes of the genre, and even his setting is the usual sort of degenerate, decaying imperial city-with no attempt to distinguish his version of this established trope. The result is a journey through a tired plot, with nothing particular to reward the reader for the time invested.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Like many other assassin characters, Caim is an orphan. But he has a ghostlike companion, Kit, whom only he can hear and see, and an uncanny ability to manipulate shadows. Set in a kingdom where the religious are not so holy and the nobility are corrupt, Caim has no loyalties and few scruples. He reluctantly accepts a contract to assassinate a nobleman, only to find that someone else got there first. He and the nobleman's daughter, Josey, become an unlikely pair in the search for her father's killers and the people who set up Caim. The intrigue, action scenes, and ever-more-revealing character insights are masterfully woven together in a book the reader won't want to put down. Questions about the origin of Caim's shadow sorcery and Kit's identity are broadly touched upon but never fully revealed, leaving readers to wonder if there will be another book to tie up the loose pieces. Overall, a first-rate sword-and-sorcery tale, with intriguing characters, that moves at a quick pace. --Rebecca Gerber

Edition details

• Publisher: Pyr
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1616142014
• ISBN 13: 9781616142018
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 279