Death’s Avenger by Charlotte English – A Book Review

Like the first book, Deaths Detective, this novel is a collection of short stories following the Malykant as he tries to bring murderers to justice on behalf of Death. Now that the character is more established some of the uniqueness of the first book is lost in this second and it can seem a little rinse and repeat in the format. For a while despite the unique setting a creative world building I feared I was getting tired of the lead character until mid-way through English introduced a running plot that really upped the stacks for our hero and his friends. His clash with a necromantic cult raised the bar considerably and elevated a bland book to a new level.

Part of this is of course that this is a set of short stories and they are meant to be read individually in a serial fashion with gaps in between, read in one binge lessened the impact, having said this the through plot of the latter stories have enough weight and meat that they could more than have serviced a full length novel in themselves giving the author more time to play on the mystery and accentuate the interplay between the characters.

These are a very good set of stories with an interesting feel. They are reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poes gothic style in their macabre manner which whilst chilling at times dos not seep into mindless jump scares or horror.

I look forward to any future instalments with the Malykant as there is still much mileage in this character as he continues to struggle with his nature and what is expected of him by both his friends and his master.

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