After Reading: THE SHOCK OF NIGHT by Patrick W. Carr

By: Meradeth Houston on 4:00 AM

When one man is brutally murdered and the priest he works for mortally wounded on the streets of Bunard, Willet Dura is called to investigate. Yet the clues to the crime lead to contradictions and questions without answers. As Willet begins to question the dying priest, the man pulls Willet close and screams in a foreign tongue. Then he dies without another word.

Willet returns to the city, no closer to answers than before, but his senses are skewed. People he touches appear to have a subtle shift, a twist seen at the edge of his vision, and it's as though he can see their deepest thoughts. In a world divided between haves and have-nots, gifted and common, Willet soon learns he's been passed the rarest gift of all: a gift that's not supposed to exist.

Now Willet must pursue the murderer still on the loose in Bunard even as he's pulled into a much more dangerous and epic conflict that threatens not only his city, but his entire world--a conflict that will force him to come to terms with his own tortured past if he wants to survive. (Goodreads)

Thanks to LibraryThing and Bethany House for a review copy in exchange for my honest review.

So it's been a while since I've read a high fantasy, and I still find myself not terrifically sold on them. Well, some of them. Tolkien is still a master. But other times I find myself not as immersed in the world, nor as able to identify (or care about) the main character. This is just my guess, but sometimes it seems that so much effort goes into explaining the new world, how it works, and what makes it unique, that there doesn't seem to be the same amount of time in delving into the character and bringing them to life in quite the same way that we see in other novels. Willet Dura, who is an interesting character, basically tells us how he is and while the novel does bear this out, I didn't find myself too terribly concerned if he lived or died. I will say that the concept of Gifts--those with extraordinary abilities that could be passed along--is quite interesting and I enjoyed it. There was a ton of intrigue and twists and turns in the book, but not enough to really captivate me. Overall, definitely a decent book, but not on my list of favorites this year.

What do you thing? Have you read a high fantasy (think swords and castles and magic) lately?