A Tremor in the Bitter Earth

In Reimann's first novel, Wind from a Foreign Sky, woodland huntress Gaultry Blas and her twin sister, Mervion, used the wild magic of their Glamour-souls to remove a dangerous traitor from the Prince's Court and defeat enemy nation Bissanty's plans to control the Free Principality of Tielmark. This sequel picks up with the twins saving Prince Benet from poisoning by a young Sha Muir assassin, Tullier. Convinced that beneath the assassin's training lies a soul worth saving, Gaultry earns the enmity of the Court by preventing Tullier's suicide, installing into his body half of her own Glamour-soul in order to withstand the poison that fills his Sha Muira veins. When Gaultry's friend Martin is kidnapped by Sha Muir assassins, Gaultry and Tullier set off to save him, only to find that the Sha Muir appear to be pawns in a much larger game of Bissanty political intrigue. Though Reimann's writing is sometimes disjointed and overblown, the ever-more-tangled plot moves swiftly along. The book ends with more plot threads dangling than tied up, but that's okay, as there's clearly plenty of story remaining to be told in the richly detailed world Reimann has created. (June)