Archeologist Taryn St. Giles has spent her life mining the ruins of the elves who vanished from the Four Kingdoms a thousand years ago. But when her patrons begin disappearing too—and then turning up dead—she finds herself unemployed, restless, and desperate. So she goes looking for other missing things: as a bounty hunter. Tracking her first fugitive—the distractingly handsome and strangely … strangely charming Alric—she unearths a dangerous underworld of warring crime lords, demonic squirrels, and a long-lost elven artifact capable of unleashing a hell on earth.
Chased, robbed, kidnapped, and distressingly low on rent money, Taryn just wants one quiet beer and to catch her fugitive. But there’s more to Alric than his wicked grin—is he a wanted man or the city’s only hope? With menacing mages in pursuit and her three alcoholic faery sidekicks always in her hair, Taryn’s curiosity might finally solve the mystery of the elves… or be the death of her and destroy her world.
If Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, invaded Stephanie Plumb’s Jersey and fell into a raucous, twisted Middle Earth, they might find Taryn St. Giles already waiting for them in this high action fantasy caper.– Jessa Slade, award-winning author of QUEEN OF STARLIGHT, Sheerspace Book 1
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Odd mix of typical fantasy and new characters, fun
Liked it so much I asked my library for the next book in the series and they ordered the whole set. I hope the rest are as good as the first.
Unique personalities owning their spaces in a world of a byzantine alternative races. Miss “Steely Resolve” and her tiny drunken henchwomen meet their match in a race to find the coveted archeological object that factions are killing to reach. Who is friend or foe? Totally absorbing adveture.Good times! What next?
The Glass Gargoyle was exciting, action packed, fun, kept me interested and was totally enjoyable. I’m looking forward to the next book.
Good
fun read. the fairies are a hoot!
Wow! This author has some serious creativity. Great world building even if on the rougher side of town. Lots and lots of different kinds of species/creatures. The story has action, humor, creativity and mystery. The characters make it very interesting and the magic just adds mayhem. Really enjoyable read.
great new fantasy series
With the opening paragraph, you are pulled into a world of drunken fairies, extinct (maybe?) elves, and characters too strange to be real – and yet you can’t help but be entranced by their foibles and attitudes.
Sometimes when I read a book, I think “I could write better stories than this.” Not with this book! I kept thinking “What will the author come up with next.” A fun read that I plan to re-read.
(EDIT: after reading the blurbs on the other books in the series I realize that the author actually DID intend this to be a comedy series. So some of what follows may not be accurate but I don’t feel like changing it. Honestly, the comedy aspect is there but it doesn’t come across strongly enough at all. )
I’m giving this one 4 stars because I really did enjoy the book a lot, but the honest truth is that the book has a few problems and probably only deserves a 3-star rating. It’s hard to say exactly why I enjoyed it. A combination of the novelty of concept and a coincidental hitting of just the right buttons to tap in to my personal interests.
PLOT
The plot was a fairly predictable rehash of several standard fantasy themes. An ancient prophecy of doom, clueless innocent stumbling into a complex conspiracy and being mistaken for a major player, helpless little girl that suddenly turns out to have amazing powers. It’s all stuff that’s been done to death in every medium possible. The lead character gets led around by the nose, stumbling continuously from one disaster to the next. More on that under characters, but it was frustrating to watch as the heroes repeatedly charge ahead without any plan and take no precautions to keep their stuff safe, and then repeatedly get abducted and lose all their stuff, take turns rescuing each other.
Some day, I’ll go back and read this again just so I can count the number of kidnappings. I think it’s probably a record.
On the plus side, the plot does finish. It has a few ups and downs, a big climax, and then it resolves without a cliffhanger (although the last page brings up a new question as a hook into the next book, but it’s more of a teaser than a cliffhanger).
3 stars for plotting
CHARACTERS
There are a lot of characters in the book, but very few of them get any real detail. Even by the end of the book most of them don’t have any personality quirks that make them stand out in any way, or memorable at all, actually. The only exception to that is the fairies, who get enough extra attention to make them interesting. All of the fairies seem to have the same personality though, but at least it’s an interesting and memorable one. The main character is a frustrating mess. It’s all written first person so you can’t get an objective view of her, but I could only make sense of the book by assuming that she must be a little bit addled or at least mentally sub-par. There’s just no other way to explain: “after already being kidnapped twice, I get a suspicious feeling, I am pretty sure this is a trap and I should go get my friends before going in, but, oh, never mind, I’ll just go on in anyway”. I don’t know if it’s what the author intended, but allowing the assumption that the main character has an IQ of about 85-90 makes the rest of the book a lot more sensible. Other than that she doesn’t seem to have much of a personality. She never seems to have strong opinions about anything and just blindly gets pulled or pushed from one scene to the next.
2 stars for characterization
WORLDBUILDING
I don’t usually split worldbuilding into sub-classes but for this one I have to differentiate between concept and description. The concept of the world is very good. The author has created a unique world populated by many different magical species. At first, the gargoyles, fairies, trolls, etc. made me think the was pulling entirely from existing mythos, but then she also has ‘races’ that are completely new. The problem is that we never get any good idea of what most of them look like. The descriptions are almost non-existent, there are some details, just nowhere near enough. The structure of society is described in slightly better detail. Sort of a characature of our own. The rich control everything. The legal system exists but seems to be kind of a joke. The book isn’t a comedy, but the world would work well as one.
So 5 stars for the concept but only 2 for the implementation, so call it 3.5 average, round up to 4
WRITING
The writing itself was very good. The author kept me immersed in the book almost constantly. There weren’t any places where I had to go back to reread because I’d lost the thread or the writing had gone off track somehow. So the readability of the book was high. Even though the book is over 300 “pages” (Kindle pages are slightly smaller than a real book’s) it took me less than three days to get through the whole thing. Faster than many shorter books.
So 5 stars for the writing style.
EDITING
There were three occurrences of major errors (things like dropping a sentence in the middle or repeating a paragraph), and a handful (less than a dozen) of small typos, misused words, etc. Overall I’d say that’s not too bad for a 300 page book.
I didn’t notice any of the more subtle story editing issues. There probably are some but I missed them so I can’t mark off for that. Other than the one thing that if I were editing I would have inquired whether the author had considered pinching up the humor aspect. I think it would work better that way but I know not every author can write that way.
4 stars for the editing.
OVERALL
All in all I enjoyed the book a lot. It wasn’t the best thing I’ve ever read but it was still good. The numbers above would average out to 3.6, so that rounds to 4 stars overall. Maybe I spoke too hastily when I said it didn’t really deserve 4 (though I think a properly weighted average might be a little lower).
I’m not specifically giving a full on recommendation for this one, I think it depends on whether you, as a reader, can handle the frustrating aspects enough to enjoy the writing. So I’ll leave that decision up to the individual. But I will be buying more of the series, which is big for me because I rarely do (there’s more than enough free stuff out there). I’ll probably skip a few and get book 4 or 5 though. I don’t think I could handle a whole series of 6 books for this.
Interesting concept and characters. Vulnerable but persistent central character. Mostly likable characters, no real villains. Follow on books are just as interesting.
It was fun to read but many of the details and thought didn’t make sense.
just didn’t match my mood on the day
Predictable, overused tropes, but a fun light read that you won’t remember for long.
It was a fun read.
There was some repetition that was a bit much but otherwise this was a great read.
Very good book! Unique creatures, or at least I had not heard of them before, well except for faeries of course. I liked that the good creatures had so much secret power instead of the bad guys always having more magic/power. Really liked the main character, Taryn. Frustrated that the author did not explain more about her back ground and the reason she could do some of the things she was capable of doing. This was a free book, and I hope that if I am going to pay money for the next books, that it will be explained at some point. Often I skip descriptive sections and jump to the dialogue, but I did not do that very often in this book if at all. This book was engrossing enough to keep my attention.
I am glad I read through this one and on to the others.
Lots of fun. REally enjoyed it. Part II is fun too!
Our heroine inhabits an almost familiar world of treasure hunting, academic archeology, and power struggles over money and historical artifacts of great power. She has to work her way through much that is hidden, including the REAL identities of some of the other characters. A fun read.