The Palace of Sinners and Saints

A daring breakout attempt at a prison for political dissidents forms the backbone of Merchant’s formulaic debut. Leading the action is Irfan Mirza, a mercenary from Pakistan who has agreed to rescue his former colleague Renata Bardales, who’s being held at a medieval fortress in the fictional country of Aldatan after speaking out against the despotic King Nimir. Mirza, “a human version of a baseball bat wrapped with barbed wire,” assembles a small posse and sneaks into the fortress by hiding on a supply truck. Inside, he will eventually have to square off against Atlas Boss, a Nimir crony and sexual sadist who runs the prison with a sinister blend of perversion and pain that he inflicts on the mostly female inmates. While Merchant ably captures the grim elements of his heightened setting, the plot never strays from clichéd rescue mission tropes, and Mirza comes across as a dull cipher: a man of few words and little personality possessed by the brute ferocity of a comic book hero. This misses the mark. Agent: Melisssa Edwards, Stonesong Literary. (May)