Ile-Rien is a fantasy land featuring in a five-novel series by award-winning Martha Wells. For 2024, the first two instalments have been updated and merged to form THE BOOK OF ILE-RIEN.  

The Element of Fire is part one, and those who like to enter a fantasy with someone young who has all their learning ahead, won’t get into this one easily. Politics and backstabbing are strong points in a tale with gory war against dark dimensions. Dowager Queen Ravenna lives in a stone castle with her son Roland and his Queen Falaise. We also meet her stepdaughter Kade, a half-Fae sorcerer, and her scheming cousin Denzil who serves Roland. At the start, guard captain Thomas Boniface is assaulting a town house full of magic traps, to retrieve a kidnapped elderly man who is another sorcerer, Galen. Thomas, we learn, has been the lover of the widowed Queen.

The wizard Galen Dubell becomes a key element in the city’s battle against a sudden invasion of magical and demonic beasts. The High Minister Aviler and a young sorcerer Braun fight off golems to take shelter behind the castle’s magical wardstones.  Pistols and swords hold off the onslaught, but for how long? Thomas and Kade decide a renegade sorcerer Urbain Grandier must be bargaining with the Unseelie Court of Fae. This is a desperate and well-peopled adventure in which nobody seems assured a happy ever after.

The Death of the Necromancer is the second tale set 100 years later. In the town of Vienne, we find thieves in the cellars. Crack, Cusard, Lamane and Nicholas, who is partway through a medical degree, attempt to steal from a town house during a ball. Captain Reynard Morane and Madeline Denare, attending the party, similarly hope to steal from Mondollot House without knowing of the bandits. The disturbance of a ghoul and gargoyles, which may have lain hidden for a century, put an end to merriment.

Now, I don’t read horror, so once I found this had descended to horror and I was ticking off words I dislike, such as revenant, corpse, ghoul, necromancer, I stopped paying attention and skipped to the end. There isn’t much else besides a haunted house in this one. We meet Rahene Fallier, the Court Sorcerer, and Macob, a necromancer. Anyone who does enjoy horror will get more from this tale. I had been hoping to get outside the cities and see the land of Ile-Rien, but I expect I’ll need to try another of the series for the surroundings. THE BOOK OF ILE-RIEN is a strong dark fantasy couplet and quite different to Martha Wells’s brilliant Murderbot and Raksura stories. Everyone will decide on their favourites.