Blood of the Four

November 1, 2017

In Quandis, everyone is a slave, even the royals; their overlords are the gods, whom they serve rigidly even as they enjoy a glorious lifestyle. One royal, beauteous Princess Phela, wants a little more of the glory, and that upsets Quandis's careful balance. New York Times best-selling Golden joins forces with Lebbon, a prolific author of horror and dark fantasy. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

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November 27, 2017
This hefty sword-and-sorcery adventure from frequent collaborators Golden and Lebbon (The Shadow Men) leaves room to bring its large, entangled cast of characters to a wider stage. At the beginning, the kingdom of Quandis is at peace. The study of magic has been left to the priesthood and largely ignored. Cunning and ruthless Princess Phela sees the awful effects of her mother’s addiction to magical lore, but once Phela becomes queen, she can’t resist the temptation of supernatural power. Meanwhile, Demos, the studly betrothed of Phela’s younger sister, is sold into slavery after his father is executed for blasphemy; Blane, a young member of the Bajuman caste (hereditarily lower than any slave) who doesn’t believe in the gods, stealthily trains as a priest but unwillingly begins to suspect that the gods and their magic are real; and Blane’s supposedly dead sister, Daria, becomes a swashbuckling admiral in the Quandian fleet. There’s something for everyone here, including some subtly feminist themes and several spectacular displays of magical conflict. This novel is an expert crowd-pleaser. Agent: Howard Morhaim, Howard Morhaim Literary.

March 1, 2018
A once-strong kingdom is torn by power struggles in this one-volume epic.In several senses, the city of Lartha, capital of the Kingdom of Quandis, is founded on the Four, four ancient sorcerers-turned-gods. Quandis' rulers claim to be descended from the Four, and the most senior priests of the Temple of Four, known as the High Order, are said to perform magic by drawing on the power of the Four, who are allegedly buried beneath the Temple. The threat to that foundation begins when Queen Lysandra unlawfully attempts to gain control over magic herself but is defeated by her drug addiction and inability to master the discipline that magic requires. Her ruthlessly ambitious middle child, Princess Phela, had initially planned to seize the throne and rule through the information she's gathered by creeping through the palace's hidden passages. But now her plots have a wider scope: She wants to master magic for herself and make her rule a divine one. As Quandis shudders underneath her tyranny and the priesthood suffers a schism, a few gather to oppose the new queen: Demos, an unfairly disgraced and enslaved baron's son; Blane, a young man of the Bajuman, the despised slave caste, who joined the priesthood to seek his own access to magic; his disguised sister, Adm. Daria Hallarte; and Phela's underestimated younger sister, Princess Myrinne. In a genre overcrowded by ever expanding series, this book demonstrates that there is plenty of room for action and intrigue in a stand-alone. There are some fairly graphic and brutal mutilations and deaths, but that darkness is balanced against sympathetic, and in some cases even pure-hearted, characters. The worldbuilding is fairly solid even if it would've been nice to understand more about how the priests wielded magic without it carving out their insides.A nicely self-contained and kinetic excursion into political fantasy.

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