I am now totally invested in Ran Del and Francesca’s lives…and so are they.

I have learned of Ran Del’s psy talents and Francesca’s ability to run the House of Hayden empire. They learn to work together and forge a marriage of love and commitment.

When danger strikes and life changing decisions have to be made, strange bedfellows will make for unlikely partners.

Freddie, as I learn about his situation, his heart, he doesn’t seem like such an arrogant, bad guy, as he did in The Sixth Discipline. Carmen Webster Buxton shows us that a book cannot be judged by its cover. People put up a front, give up when hitting a brick wall…or at least it seems they do. Give people a chance and they might surprise you.

Freddie will play an important role in the House of Hayden’s future.

The clan shaman had said Ran Del’s destiny was in the city and his life will come full circle.

As all the forces come together, I love how Carmen brought the story to an end. I did not see it happening the way it did, but it makes perfect sense. Well done Carmen.

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Although this book is the sequel to The Sixth Discipline it also stands up in its own right, both as an engaging story and as a description of a varied fantasy world.

The story continues the life of Ran-Del Jahanpur. However, this is an older and calmer Ran-Del, happily married with two children and a third on the way. While he still sees the value of Sansoussy culture he also accepts that the culture of the City has value. In contrast to the dismissal of different cultures that threatened his happiness as a young man, it is his son’s desire to truly experience tribal life as well as the rarefied life of the major houses that created conflict with Francesca. In contrast with Ran-Del’s quest to maintain the life he has, the story also charts the struggle of Freddie Leong, surviving son of a rival house, to break free of the life forced upon him by Ran-Del’s execution of his brother.

The first section of the book contains a number of recaps of key points from The Sixth Discipline, which serve to introduce new readers or refresh the memory. Unlike some recaps, which result in characters saying variations of “As you know….” or reading large sections of historical documents, the introduction of Ran-Del’s children as proxies for the reader combined with the new points of view from House Leong make the exposition fit seamlessly into the narrative.

As with its prequel, the character development is sound. Existing characters are recognisable but have matured over the intervening years, and new or expanded characters share the same flawed yet sympathetic viewpoint.

The further expansion of the world is also skilled. In addition to a series of fine grain details of City and Sansoussy life, this book shows the reader the society of the Horde, the child-stealing anarchist bogeymen of the first book. Just as with the comparison of the two cultures in The Sixth Discipline, Webster Buxton portrays the Horde as a real society; threatening to outsiders, but a tradition-bound descendant of compromise decisions when viewed from within. In contrast with some novels set among the faceless enemy of earlier books the narrative adds depth not contradictions or excuses.

The only part of the novel that did not work for me was the conflict in Freddie Leong’s romance; while the rest of the plots flowed naturally from the conflict of three societies and the variations within them, the romance descended into the comedy business of Elizabethan drama or French farce.

Overall I enjoyed this novel greatly, and would again recommend the world to those seeking a story set in a believably complex fantasy world.

I received a free copy of this book from the author in exchange for a fair review. ( )

This is the sequel to The Sixth Discipline, which really ought to be read first as this refers back to a lot of incidents in that book. It begins the equivalent of nine earth years latter, and takes up the major plot line not resolved in the first book, namely why did Ran-Del's great-grandfather, the shaman and clan leader, force him to marry Francesca Haydn? The marriage has turned out pretty well, but that certainly wasn't the reason, these societies not putting a high premium on individual preferences.

It all starts out so innocently. Ran-Del and Francesca, the latter somewhat reluctantly, have sent their son Christopher to stay with his great-grandparents, Isayah and Mina Jahanpur, to experience life in Ran-Del's native village. What a disaster this turns out to be! The unstated burning issue at the end of the book is whether Francesca will ever let anyone in her family outside their fortified compound again!

The story splits into three lines at this point. Two are the parallel stories of Christopher and his parents, which eventually converge. The third, mostly unrelated, is the story of the extremely dysfunctional Leong family, whom we met as secondary characters in the first book. I enjoyed the whole book, but this was the story line that really kept me up until one o'clock reading to see who would win. I kept putting the book down to sleep, telling myself firmly that I had to work the next day, but I kept reading just a little more, unable to bear the suspense. One of the things that I like about these books is that although there are plenty of action scenes, it isn't all shoot-em up. Many of the struggles are intellectual and based more on plotting and conniving than on brute strength. There is a great deal of emphasis on family relationships, sometimes some very strange ones. The author has a lot of romantic elements, but the women as well as the men are very strong, independent characters.

Also in this book, we meet the descendants of the third group of colonists of Haven: the Horde, or the People, as they call themselves. We are not told until the end what their motivation for leaving earth was, but it becomes pretty clear that either they didn't find what they were looking for, or it wasn't all it was cracked up to be. I don't think its a spoiler if I tell you that they wanted to have no governmental control of their lives. I was reminded of C.J. Cherryh complaining that people always thought that "barbarians" lived a wild, free-wheeling life, when in fact, their lives require strict discipline in order to survive in what are often harsh conditions, The People seem to have learned this the hard way. ( )