When one man is brutally murdered and the priest he works for mortally wounded on the streets of Bunard, Willet Dura is called to investigate. Yet the clues to the crime lead to contradictions and questions without answers. As Willet begins to question the dying priest, the man pulls Willet close and screams in a foreign tongue. Then he dies without another word.
Willet returns to the city, no closer to answers than before, but his senses are skewed. People he touches appear to have a subtle shift, a twist seen at the edge of his vision, and it's as though he can see their deepest thoughts. In a world divided between haves and have-nots, gifted and common, Willet soon learns he's been passed the rarest gift of all: a gift that's not supposed to exist.
Now Willet must pursue the murderer still on the loose in Bunard even as he's pulled into a much more dangerous and epic conflict that threatens not only his city, but his entire world--a conflict that will force him to come to terms with his own tortured past if he wants to survive.
Now, the harder part. The review. Boy, oh boy. Trying to make sense of what doesn't make sense. Is that me talking about the book, or my feelings on the book, well, your guess is as good as mine. I know this book deserves at least 4 stars, probably even a 4.5, but I'm thinking.... Anyway, back to actually doing things. This book is very well written. You must remember (as if you could forget!) that this is fantasy so it's doubly make-believe. The characters are strongly written, and you don't really have passive feelings for even the minor characters. I think part of that is the fact that while most of the book is written in first person, the other part is third person of Pellin, which makes it really neat. Then you get to become the character, but while you are just traveling from one side of the city to the other or knocked unconscious, the storyline keeps moving forward and nothing really drags. It is a multi-faceted storyline and that sucks you in pretty well. While I did not read this book in one sitting (It's 400+ pages for goodness' sakes!) I did go at it pretty hard and really did enjoy it. Thankfully, I was able to read this as the fantasy it is and not take offense at the strange weird things that happen in its pages. If you enjoy fantasy, and if you can handle the weirdness of switching POVs so drastically (I realize this could be obnoxious for a lot of people) then go for it. I enjoyed it immensely, and suspect you will too. (P.S. This is the first in the series, and I had already read the second book a year or more ago, so that may have influenced this review a tad. Link to the review for The Shattered Vigil below picture. I hope it isn't a terrible one. I know it's from early on so....)
http://lovewhatyourreading.blogspot.com/2016/12/review-shattered-vigil-by-patrick-w-carr.html
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