Empress Game
The Empress Game Trilogy Book 1
-
-
4.2 • 9 Ratings
-
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
‘Power, grace, deadliness defined. Always cunning, endlessly victorious…’
One seat on the intergalactic Sakien Empire’s supreme ruling body, the Council of Seven, remains unfilled: that of the Empress Apparent. The seat isn’t won by votes or marriage. It’s won in a tournament of ritualized combat. Now the tournament, the Empress Game, has been called and the women of the empire will stop at nothing to secure political domination for their homeworlds. Kayla Reunimon, a supreme fighter, is called by a mysterious stranger to battle it out in the arena.
The battle for political power isn’t contained by the tournament’s ring, however. The empire’s elite gather to forge, strengthen or betray alliances in a dance that will determine the fate of the empire for a generation. With the empire wracked by a rising nanovirus plague and stretched thin by an ill-advised planet-wide occupation of Ordoch in enemy territory, everything rests on the woman who rises to the top.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Debut author Mason opens a space opera series with this fascinating merger of galactic exploration and deadly competition. Kayla Reinumon was once a princess of Ordoch, a "Wyrd World" whose inhabitants possess incredible psionic powers, but she fled with her brother during a coup that killed their entire family. Now a refugee fighting in nightly blood matches on a distant planet under an assumed name, Kayla is approached by the very same people who killed her kin, inviting her to compete in the Empress Game a grand tournament by which the Sakien Empire will find its new queen. For the chance to return home and regain what's left of her old life, Kayla must enter a world of political intrigue, betrayal, and conspiracies within conspiracies that threaten the fates of entire planets. Mason takes every opportunity to raise the stakes for her characters, and the result is an immersive and intriguing thriller. Tonally, however, her prose is more than slightly uneven; the frequent use of current colloquialisms alongside alien terminology is distracting at best. But Mason's deft plotting packs an emotional punch and leads to a solid cliffhanger that could spark a fascinating new series.
