Strange Fortune
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Dashing soldier of fortune Major Valentine Strange, late of the Emperor of Alba's 21st Regiment of Benhali Lancers, is hired by Brahman Ehimay Warrick to find a legendary diadem reputedly hidden in a lost monastery somewhere deep in the distant, snowy mountains of Hidush.
To ensure Strange's success in this quest vital to the future of the politically unstable Hidush, the powerful Holy Orders designate Master Aleister Grimshaw, a powerful young witch with his own history of instability—political and other—to accompany the dashing major.
But long before Strange and the unwilling Grimshaw reach the tea bushes of the foothills and the lost city of Nagara, they realize there are forces both natural and unnatural at work to stop them from ever achieving their objective.
Their only chance for success relies on each other and their tentative friendship—as does their only hope for survival.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mystery author Lanyon (the Adrien English series) makes his first foray into fantasy with a taut, energetic and romantic tale. In Hidush, an analogue for India in its final days as a British colony, a colonial religious group sends bisexual adventurer Maj. Valentine Strange and troubled witch Aleister Grimshaw to retrieve a goddess's lost diadem from a mountain monastery. As the two men are beset by traitors, wild animals, monks with political agendas and a spiritual force that threatens all of Hidush, their mutual attraction unfolds beautifully and dramatically. Beneath Lanyon's breezy pulp-style prose is a real (and mostly successful) effort to critique the genre's heritage of colonialism, racism and sexism, and though his research feels thin in a few place, there's still plenty to satisfy fans of fantasy, adventure and romance.
