Saturday 20 April 2013

SCIENCE FICTION/FANTASY REVIEW: The Bloodline Feud - Charles Stross

Release Date: 11/04/13
Publisher:  Tor (Pan Macmillan)

SYNOPSIS:

The Family Trade and The Hidden Family - The first two installments of the Merchant Princes series combined in one volume. Miriam Beckstein is a successful reporter for a hi-tech magazine. So when she discovers a huge money-laundering scam, she thinks she's hit the big time. But when she takes it to her editor, not only is she fired, but she starts to receive death threats. And that's just the beginning. To distract her furious daughter, Miriam's adoptive mother unearths mementos from her real mother, murdered when she was an infant. But these reveal a secret that will ultimately throw entire governments into disarray. For what Miriam thinks is a simple locket has the power to fling her into an alternate timeline. In this less-developed world, knights on horseback wield automatic weapons, and world-skipping assassins lurk -- all on the other side of our reality. Here, her true family runs a criminal empire -- and they want her back. But Miriam has other plans.


REVIEW:

To be honest this isn’t a new book by Charles but a republishing of the first two titles in Merchant Princes series (The Family Trade and The Hidden Family) so fans hoping for a new title will be sadly disappointed with this. Yet worry not, if you’ve not read these books yet, you have one hell of a ride ahead.

Blending Sci-Fi and Fantasy together, Charles really gives the reader one hell of a ride for their buck, it has some cracking characters, great prose and a whole set of events that have far reaching consequences within the worlds concerned. All round it’s a cracking read and when you add Charles own unique writing style to the fore really gives you a couple of books that will keep you glued from start to finish, trust me, it’s well worth picking up this series in order to read them back to back. Great stuff.



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