The Hammer
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4.3 • 12 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A new stand-alone novel from the acclaimed author of The Company and The Folding Knife.
Gignomai is the youngest brother in the current generation of met'Oc, a once-noble family exiled on an island for their role in a vaguely remembered civil war.
On this island, a colony was founded seventy years ago. The plan was originally for the colonists to mine silver, but there turned out not to be any.
Now, an uneasy peace exists on the island, between the colonists and the met'Oc. The met'Oc are tolerated, in spite of occasional cattle stealing raids, since they alone possess the weapons considered necessary protection against the island's savages.
Gignomai is about to discover exactly what it is expected of him, and what it means to defy his family. He is the hammer who will provide the spark that will ignite a brutal and bloody war.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Which matters more, intent or outcome? Parker (The Folding Knife) explores this dilemma in an understated tale of vengeance, along with the social paradox of keeping the peace when justice demands stirring up old crimes. In the backwater colony of an empire whose culture is borrowed from the Italian Renaissance, we encounter Gignomai met'Oc, youngest son of an exiled noble family. Gignomai decides to repudiate his inheritance and escape to the wilderness to start a factory that will break a trade monopoly that impoverishes the colonists. In the process, he triggers a series of events that will lead to an accounting for his family's secret and independence for the colony. Parker offsets the inevitability of the plot, foreordained as a Greek tragedy, by a continual inversion of types, like peasant mobs who need to be shamed into storming the castle and savages who speak more elegantly than Gignomai's father. While the revenge plot and mocking tone would do credit to a Jacobean drama, Parker maintains a cool and detached atmosphere, giving the work the feel of a stately court dance and not a blood-racing tarantella.
