Queen's Adept

The Queen of Alboné and her entourage are going to Honoi in a diplomatic mission. Yáxtor Brandan, empirical adept at the Queen's service, will be among them. But he is not the Yáxtor Brandan he used to be. He has recovered the stolen memories from his past and he is beginning to assimilate them. Little by little, people and places that until now had no meaning for Yáxtor are becoming more and more familiar and the empirical adept finds himself in the middle of an unexpected exploration of his past. Old forgotten faces from his youth walk his mind halls and begin to give new shape to what he is and what he can become. His first love, his old mentor, his wife and his son, a betrayed lover and a new friend… those are the faces from Yáxtor's past he has to confront. And also a new one, an unknown face hidden in the shadows that could be the face of his greatest enemy.

The People's Covenant and God's Hammer have raged a Cold War that has lasted for over twenty years. A war without armies, where battles are fought in the dark and information is the most dangerous weapon. In this world -which sometimes seems the Middle Ages, sometimes the Renaissance and sometimes the Nineteenth Century- lives Yáxtor Brandan, empirical adept at the service of the Queen of Alboné. A relentless, amoral and unscrupulous character, Yáxtor fights to recover his own past as he tries to prevent a new player in the espionage game to end the world, as he knows it. A fascinating fast-moving and complex plot, full of tension and surprises and excellently paced; a main character for whom it should be impossible to feel the slightest sympathy, and yet somehow we do, even as his cruelty disturbs us more and more -an extremely difficult feat to pull off so successfully; powerful secondary actors, who either leave you with a sense of uneasiness with regard to their motivations and loyalties, or make you want to shout out -as people did in the early days of cinema- "Look out, don't trust him!"; and a pervading atmosphere of tragedy, especially in a final unexpected and shocking, yet on reflection almost inevitable, scene. In short, a totally addictive and highly original novel set in a world that is at once both strangely familiar and disturbingly alien. -Steve Redwood, author of Fisher of Devils.