Author: Mercedes Lackey
Title: Closer to Home
Format: Hardback
Year Published: 2015
Closer to Home is the second book in the Herald Spy series, and a much stronger book than any in the preceding Collegium Chronicles. Unfortunately, this still doesn’t make it one of the best Valdemar books.
In Closer to Home, Mags and Amily are settling into their new roles – Mags has his little band of informants and is working hard to establish them in places where they’ll gain more information for him. Amily is starting to settle into her role as the King’s Own. Her uncertainty in the role is understandable, and rang true, but so did the way she began to take it over and make it hers. I also enjoyed the idea she has of creating the Queen’s Handmaidens, and using them to become her own network of spies.
Neither are able to relax in their roles, however, as a threat from one of their allies has arisen. With a child King on the throne of Menmellith, a rebellion has sprung up. A rebellion supplied with weapons with a Valdemarian mark. Now it’s a race against time to find out who is actually supplying the weapons, before war starts in earnest.
Mags is once again forced to go back to the mines where he grew up, taking along one of Amily’s new spies and the man who had trained his mentor, hoping to find the information that they need to stop the war.
One of the big downsides of the book, to me, is the return of Kirball. (Because seriously – why? I was so happy Mags was no longer involved in the sport!) (This may be a flaw in me – I wasn’t the biggest fan of the Quidditch scenes in Harry Potter, and the Podracing scene in Star Wars makes me want to kill somebody.)
Another thing that annoyed me was the way Mags kept going on about how everything he was seeing at the Rolmer mines was in comparison to the way it had been at the mines he’d lived at. I understood that his upbringing had a very negative impact on him, but the way he kept going “but Cole Pieter had done this so differently” and never really seemed to fully grasp that he was, maybe, wrong rubbed me the wrong way. Had it been presented more in a manner of “Mags knew what to look for due to his experiences and so he looked for those types of clues” it might have been easier to swallow.
Amily has very little to do in this book – she’s essentially spinning her wheels, training and building up her network and working with Mags’ little groups/projects, but most of that feels like building for the future, rather than helping in the here and now.
While I enjoyed Tuck (their new inventor friend), his introduction feels more like a way to give our heroes tools that they might not otherwise have, or to put it another way, it seems like the author saw a spy show, went “oh, those are cool” and then worked out a way to put them in without pausing to consider if they were really necessary. (I felt much the same way about Mags’ assassin relatives and their martial arts skills.)
The ending felt… odd. Somewhat abrupt, with a character who was barely introduced and then is overcome fairly easily. There were several loose threads that I don’t believe the author will clean up in the next book and will therefore irk me.
All in all, the book didn’t wow me, but it also didn’t make me want to throw it across the room. 3/5 stars.
Objects in Motion 