The Pact of the White Blade Knights by Barbara RussellMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I was approached by the author to see if I would review an Advanced Reader Copy and I was intrigued by the subject enough to give it a go. Barbara Russell is not an author I’d come across before so I was taking a bit of a leap of faith, but I’m glad I did. All opinions are my own.
Welcome to the world of the sin-eaters and sin-breathers. There’s a centuries old war that started with the Crusades, between these two factions. The White Blade Knights, a small band of knights who made a Pact to fight evil for eternity, banded together forever to draw strength and power from each other, they became sin-eaters. Sin-breathers generate one of each of the Seven Deadly Sins in a human, contaminating them with evil. Sin-eaters are their opposite number, able to consume the sins of humans to give them the choice of free will without the corruption of their previous sins weighing them down.
Centuries after their beginnings, a woman in London in 1884, gets drawn into their endless battle for good or evil. Hazel is alone in the world. She is a talented scholar who has just been fired from her job at the Royal Archeological Society. She has no other source of income and knows, as a woman, it will be difficult to find employment elsewhere. Forced to take any job, even ones that make her slightly wary she is approached by two very different men in the same day to offer her work.
Neither jobs make her very comfortable but she ends up taking the job offered by Sebastyon Sancerre, as the lesser of two evils. Her job is to help locate an object she has held at work and was drawn to. Tyon, as he asks to be called, sounds mad with his talk of sorcery, and his need to find his brothers with the mystery object, but a woman’s got to eat!
This story is very different from a lot of Paranormal Romance books. It is quite plot heavy and the romance part of the book is woven into the plot seamlessly enough that it verges on the Urban Fantasy. However, the romance is front and centre and sex is talked about explicitly throughout.
The characters were really interesting. Hazel is a strong, educated and independent woman in a time where women were still expected to put marriage and family above all other desires. She’s in a difficult and vulnerable position but she still manages to meet all the strange and different things that are thrown at her, head on.
Tyon is filled with fury, frustration and grief over the loss of his brothers to betrayal. His powers are unbalanced by the absence of his fellow White Blade Knights and his attraction to Hazel is distracting whilst he is doing his best to fight alone against the sin-eaters, in particular the brother knight who betrayed his order five years earlier, Aleximanus.
Aleximanus is an intriguing character who has embraced the evil of the sin-eaters for reasons we are initially unaware of. He seeks to contaminate Hazel into becoming a lust-breather so that he may destroy Tyon. He demonstrates the consequences of the sacrifices that are made in order to fight evil for centuries at a time.
This is a complex and interesting story that keeps you reading. I enjoyed that it is set in London in the 1880s. It adds an extra touch of fun to the story. The ending creates a Happy for Now situation but there is definitely a lot more to come with this story.
The release date for this book is 24th October 2019
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