Hello everyone!
I'm back with a non-Star Wars book review, can you believe it?
I hardly can myself.
It's been a bit of a ride for me, traipsing through the galaxy far, far away, and I know I'll return over there eventually again, but maybe not quite so soon. I have a few other books on the list that have been BOUNCING around, trying to get my attention.
Although the item of tonight's blog post didn't need to do anything.
It sort of only had to get published.
Readers of this blog might know and recall my almost-undying love for the Black Dagger Brotherhood series by J. R. Ward, and the fact that I've pretty much reviewed ... about half ot the books so far? Did I get to half? More?
Anyway.
When it was announced that Murhder was getting his own book, I was HELLA intrigued. Because he's the only insane Brother, and has been name-dropped all over the place. So with The Savior, we finally get to hear his story.
There will be links, in series order (not the order in which I reviewed them), at the bottom of this page for all the other Brotherhood books that I've already gone through. At some point, I promise I'll catch them all (like Pokemon!) and I HAVE actually read at least the first eight to en or so more than once. It's only the recent ones, from about thirteen onwards, that I have yet to re-read.
But be that as it may, at this point we probably have to recap what's going on a little:
so the Black Dagger Brotherhood are an elite band of warriors who protect the vampire race from Lessers. Now, the vampires in these books need to feed off the opposite sex of their own species to survive, and Lessers are humans who get turned into baby powder-smelling pseudo-zombies by an entity called The Omega. The Omega is the antagonistic counterpart to the Scribe Virgin, who created the vampires, and the two are brother and sister, duking it out for supremacy.
Caught in between is pretty much everyone else, although at this point in the novels, the Lessening Society is, well ... lessening. There aren't that many of them left, and the King with his entourage believe they can finally see an end to this war they've been fighting for centuries.
But wait! There's more.
The Scribe Virgin has sort of poofed and gone into the ether, and the Omega hasn't actually been seen in a long, long while now (here's the thing, it's all about balance, so if one of them is gone, the other is probably following soon after that), but it looks like something else is prowling the streets of Caldwell now - some sort of "shades" that, when they attack and kill someone, manage to turn THOSE corpses into undead zombies who pretend they're piranhas and want to bite everything and everyone around them.
Anyway, that's where we're at when we dig into The Savior.
Murhder has been visited by the King's solicitor to sign some papers, not that anyone in the Brotherhood is happy about it since, you know, crazy train, but the crazy has a problem of his own: see, he's been seeing this face in a shard of a scrying bowl for years now, the face of a female he thinks he was destined to save, but failed, so now he needs the King's help to do what needs doing. Said female has reached out to him through letters, and needs help.
Ergo, Murhder packs up and heads up to an audience with the King, which makes EVERYONE unhappy because, again, crazy.
Or so everyone says. By this point, the reader's are beginning to wonder just what specifies crazy in these books, because Murhder seems to be doing pretty okay ... and mostly just questions the reality around him like he's disconnected from it.
The reasons for that are as follows: when he was still a member of the Brotherhood, he had a thing for Xhex, and they were sort of together, but thinking she'd been abducted by Sympaths (another nasty subspecies with mind tricks) he'd gone after her only to learn SHE was half-sympath, and ended up caught and tortured by her relatives, while Xhex was sold to some humans for experiments.
Naturaly, Murhder went a little bit coocoo after that, but did in fact follow after Xhex to try and find her, and free her - except she didn't need his help. She kind of set fire to those labs all on her own, but Murhder learned there were more of those facilities and went into one, rogue, where he found two vampires, one a pregnant female, being experimented on. Unfortunately, he was unable to save either of them, with the male dying and the female left behind while Murhder needed to hustle, and it's haunted him ever since.
And oh yeah, the fall-out from that fire and him going Bram Stoker on the scientists kind of needed Brotherhood clean-up, so they were pissed off ... and, since he took blame for everything without mentionign Xhex or the Sympaths, he got kicked out.
At this point, however, that female he was forced to leave behind has told him she gave birth to a son while in captivity and, while she herself has escaped, her son is still in there. This kicks Murhder into action and he goes to the King with it, where Vishous manages to locate the female, but the Brotherhood is kind of wary about lending Murhder any help. For them, it's within reason, but for the readers, it's like ... okay then.
Anyway, Murhder reaches the poor female in time only for her to extract a promise from him to care for her son before she passes away, and now Murhder needs to actually get to the location she'd given him, and get her son.
But this time, he won't be going in alone.
A subplot in this book revolves, naturally, around John and Xhex, with the past coming out to haunt our favourite part-Sympath, which causes friction between the mated couple as Xhex seems unwilling to tell John precisely how she feels, so naturally he feels excluded (and jealous). It doesn't help that, as someone who isn't a member of the Brotherhood but still fights for them, he occasionally needs to sit some meetings out, too, so it all just starts piling up on him ...
... not to mention that one of those shade-created-zombies bites him.
Of course John doesn't mention the wound at first, not even as it goes black and spreads like an infection, until Tohr accidentally grabs that shoulder and hauls the kid to the doctors, who have no clue how to help him. So on top of EVERYTHING else, there's that we're contending with.
On the other hand, the second half of our story, just as Murhder is gearing up to go for the kid, is a researcher and scientist, Sarah Watkins, who actually works for the facility in question.
She was engaged to be married to a fellow scientist but he unfortunately passed two years ago, only at this point the FBI is here to snoop and ask questions about his death that cause her suspicions to flare up - and when she finds a hidden flash drive with files on there indicating the facility is conducting inhumane experiments on someone, she's horrified and wants to do something about it, pronto.
Which means that, at the time Murhder, along with John and Xhex for backup, drops at the facility, Sarah has actually already grabbed the pre-transition male and is making her getaway as the alarms go off.
The two groups converge, merge, and nab the CEO of the entire firm whom Xhex remembers well, and while Murhder gets Sarah and the boy, Nate, out of there, John and Xhex remain to make sure everything's going to be covered up and dealt with (which it is - Xhex does all kind of fun Sympath things which prompt the CEO to close up shop and commit suicide). Murhder gets Nate over to the Brotherhood compound because the boy's transition is about to hit, and as much as everyone wants to keep Sarah in the dark, she sort of accidentally sees the whole blood-drinking thing, and starts asking questions.
Murhder explains how things go in the world - vampires don't sparkle, y'all - and at this point he's also figured out the face in that shard has always been Sarah's, so we've got a slightly coocoo but BONDED male on our hands now! Spleeeendid.
Sarah is kind of feeling the same sort of attraction, but even though they can consumate their relationship, there's a problem: Sarah can't stay, no matter the pleas directly to the King, or that she might even be valuable in the bigger scheme of things with John's infection and the like. See, when she takes note of it, she and Jane sit down and start going through what they know and what could be done, and eventually, coupled with Nate's transition and his blood tests, Sarah comes up with a possible solution to deal with John's spreading infection:
if they can convince his body that he's going through the Change (aka turning into a fully-fledged vampire) then they could in theory kick-start his white blood cell numbers, get them to rise, and they should attack the infection and kill it.
Perfect. Only, they don't know if it'll work, or kill him.
So Murhder volunteers as guinea pig.
Cutting his hair short from the black-and-red mane he used to have, making sure Sarah knows just how much he loves her, Murhder puts himself onto the gurney for John, whom he only just learned is the son of one of his best friends, Darius (remember D? He kind of dies at the very beginning of the series but is at the heart of EVERYTHING), and so he wants to try and save the kid. He's saved Nate, after all, so now it's time to do the right thing.
Luckily for us all, the cure works, and in the process Murhder actually heals completely from what the Sympaths had done to him, so now he's whole and steady again, but still has to say goodbye to Sarah and scrub her memories clean, per order of the King. He does say goodbye - but doesn't do anything for her memories, as per her request. Who's going to know, anyway?
So with only the braid of his hair left as memento, Sarah's now thinking about moving to a different county to start fresh, while Murhder is trying to figure out what his life is going to be about now.
Which is where Tohr comes in with a little hey-how-ya-doin visit, after Xhex goes to him and spills the beans about what REALLY happened at the time the Brotherhood thought one of their own went completely crazy (Murhder was protecting Xhex and her Sympath blood which was why he didn't say anything himself). So now Tohr is there, as Lieutenant and de facto leader of the Brotherhood, to apologise to his Brother and ask him to come back into the fold. The more fighters, the merrier.
Especially with Throe on the loose.
Oh, yeah, remember Throe? He's still gunning for the throne, still being creepy with that book, but the shades that are causing all these troubles are starting to behave oddly ... but who cares, he's throwing a dinner party for the glymera! Those self-righteous fools who despise Wrath for turning the monarchy into a democratic election process and stripping them of their dues should turn up any second, then Throe will stage an attack on them, and with the Brotherhood a no show, he'll "save" everyone, and get their support.
Only, Boone, one of the trainees in the Brotherhood fighter program, comes to the King with word about what's happening, so Wrath orders the Brotherhood over there - including Murhder, who pops up in the nick of time to fight for what he loves and wants, for his King, and for Sarah, not necessarily in that order.
The attack goes down, the Brothers get into it to rescue the glymera, and Throe ... gets sucked into the Book.
If you haven't read Ward's Fallen Angels series, a quickie: this Book is apparently a conduit for Devina, the antagonistic entity from that series who was captured and locked up, right until Throe released her from her prison, so now HE takes her place, and she saunters off into the world at large. Please note that it was FALLEN ANGELS who dealt with Devina originally.
Ring any bells?
Maybe it will by the time John is formally inducted into the Brotherhood, and Lassiter, the FALLEN ANGEL, reveals himself as the entity who replaced the Scribe Virgin. He also does Murhder a solid and apparently makes Sarah immortal, so that she can live her life out with Murhder and Nate, whom they sort of adopt/invite to live with them, and now Sarah can help the Brotherhood out with science stuff, too.
And also ... maybe she can find Lassiter a proper pair of pants. Because ass-less leathers are just NOT good on the eyes, lemme tell you.
THE END
Where do I begin with this book? For me, the previous two or so Brotherhood novels felt weird and completely out-of-whack, so this one was a REFRESHING and WELCOME shift back to what the old Brotherhood felt like. The characters were once again mostly themselves, there was really the old feel of camaraderie and friendship and FAMILY, and OHMYGOD TOHR WAS BACK I CAN'T EVEN.
That one hurt the most, how Tohr was sort of twisted a little bit out of the character we know and love, and also HOW EVERYONE AROUND HIM SEEMED TO GO TOTALLY CRAZY character-wise in the one book that shall not be named. Tohr was the only normal of the lot, but even he needed some recalibration, so now it looks like we're back on track. FINALLY!
And it'll be an epic Lassiter vs Devina beat-down at some point. TEAM LASSITER!
xx
*image not mine
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