Wolf Justice by Doranna Durgin is a completely mediocre book, there’s nothing particularly bad but neither is there anything spectacularly good. And reading it right after The Night Circus means that it suffers a bit by comparison. It’s a very quick, light read but it just doesn’t do much to distinguish itself from the bulk of generic fantasy.
This is the sequel to Touched by Magic, but only in the sense that it has the same characters and not in the sense that it continues the story found there. Like Touched by Magic this is a complete story and could be read as a stand alone novel. I need to steal the Amazon summary outright because it just didn’t stay with me that well.
Magic is back in Reandn’s world–and when wizards use it to slaughter his Remote Wolf Patrol, he is left adrift in a society still reeling from the changes wrought by magic’ return.
But King’s Keep offers him a chance to regain his rank: escort the beloved Higborn woman through the rebel-torn Resioran border to King’s Keep. Soon enough Reandn is embroiled in wizard’s treachery. To make it out alive–to keep Kalena alive and prevent a catastrophic wizard war–he’ll have to face his own worst enemy.
Magic.
There’s also a very pleasant love story built in and it’s one of the more enjoyable aspects of the book. But it wasn’t a surprise, it’s been telegraphed from the last book. That’s probably one of my issues, there are so very few surprises in the novel. Everything is very strongly telegraphed, and I knew exactly what was going on about half-way through the book.
There are hints at the end of this novel that there might be a third story in this world, as there is a bit of set up done, but I’m not going to rush out and see if I can track it down. Like I said, there is nothing terribly wrong with the novel, but it’s just mediocre. And coming right after a great book means I’m feeling very disappointed.
This is another book that was originally published by Baen in the late 1990s and then self-published when the rights somehow reverted back to Durgin. As I said in my last review, I’m fairly impressed by this publishing tactic as it does keep her work available long after other similar works have faded into obscurity. That said, the errors were a lot more present in this book. Typos and sentence errors abound, to the point where a characters name isn’t capitalized at one point. Small things that should have been caught. So while I admire what Durgin is doing in keeping her writing available to readers, I think she ought to invest in an editor after she does her tweaks, even if the books have already been seen by the Baen editors. (I mean, it was a Baen paperback, I doubt is saw the most thorough editing in the first place.
I can’t really say YES GO READ THIS NOW. Because I don’t feel that way at all. But I also think there are worse ways to spend a morning then reading this. And I do think I would have eaten it up as a teen. And you know what, it’s WAY better then The Sword of Shannara. So there’s that.
