For most people, running a funeral home is a dull and conservative line of work, but when Catherine Samuels inherits the family business she discovers that it is anything but straightforward. For a start, the dead do not always stay dead, they sit up, and they bite. In this strange world, Catherine needs help, and that comes in the form of Cassandra (Cassie) Evans, a heavily armed problem solver, knowledgeable in all things arcane and undead.
Cassie, however, hates her posting to Catherine Samuels. Her charge knows nothing of family, her heritage, nor her duty as the sole remaining caretaker of The Gate, a sentient construct that guards the way to Hell and stops the inhabitants of Hell finding their way to the land of the living. Anyone who does not understand the importance of this duty is a liability. Catherine is a liability. Except that Cassie finds an unsettling attraction developing between them that she neither expects nor wants. Duty first, there is no room for emotional entanglements, and certainly not with a woman who rejects all that Cassie thinks is imp07ortant.
When Catherine finds herself on the brink of losing everything, Cassie, her family, and even life itself, then she must awaken. She must become ‘The Samuel’, The Gate Keeper, and guard the way between the living and the dead. To make it safe she must travel to Hell, with the warrior that she has chosen, and there, if they survive, she must heal the problems of the Gate before all hell breaks loose.
Knight’s Sacrifice is billed as a paranormal novel – and it is, with a hefty dose of mythology brought into the modern world, a nice adaption of the Heaven/Hell/Guardian Angels, and some rather freaky zombies! But it’s also a love story between a woman who knows nothing of the world she’s pushed into, and a woman who knows too much – and isn’t sure that she can take the path she so desperately wants.
Although this premise sounds great, there were a number of issues that made the book a frustrating experience for me. The relationship between Cassie and Catherine (incidentally, also one of the annoying points – I kept mixing them up!) is an essential point of the novel, winding into the mythology of the world. But for me the plot focused too heavily on that central pair, at the expense of other aspects.
Yes, Cassie and Catherine are important, and I did like seeing their relationship grow – but the walk-on nature of the supporting parts made me feel as if anyone could have been playing those, rather than having characters and personalities in their own right. I would have liked to know more about the background, seen more of the tensions there, without feeling that it was all just background scenery to the heroines and their struggle. The supporting characters get rather forgotten, or used to develop plot, added in for an important moment and then phased out again.
Other parts of the plot also attempted to derail my suspension of belief. I found it strange that Catherine was not told anything about the business even though she was involved in it; her ignorance served as a plot device, but I didn’t understand why she’d been kept in ignorance originally. If your family is traditionally in charge of a major gateway then surely you’d ensure everyone needed was aware of it – particularly if you knew there were Bad People out there who were trying to act against you? I will freely admit that I’m cynical and it is a failing when I read anything with wide-ranging disasters in, but I do find it hard to get hooked on a plot that could be less disaster-filled if a little common sense had been injected.
I also had the same cynicism when it came to the love story. The romance does swamp everything else, and both the heroines’ thoughts continually go back to the other partner. It’s very sweet and it does work very well for the partnership as the pair grow together, but for me it continually highlighted the sheer annoyance of the plot; if the protagonists just sat down and had a nice long chat as soon as they realised there was a problem, then everything would be a lot easier (although admittedly the book would be a lot shorter). And when the ‘advisor’ figures are pointing out that one heroine just needs to talk to the other, or they just need to know one more bit of information, except no one ever quite ends up on the same page…I just end up frustrated.
These points added up. Admittedly, I don’t always get on with plots that rely on cataclysmic events, big gestures and ignorance to propel the plot, and in the end the conclusion seemed to collapse under the annoyances of what had gone before. It did seem to rather come out of nowhere.
To give Knight’s Sacrifice its due, it is a readable book. Despite my grumbles, the romance between Catherine and Cassie has some lovely moments, and the background mythology was an interesting adaption. There were some genuinely scary moments, and the writing of the prose often worked well. But overall, and perhaps fatally, I didn’t find myself hooked on the plot and I couldn’t empathise with either heroine. So while the romance is adorable and the plot is dramatic, this isn’t a book I’d recommend.
© Kate Coe, May 2017
Knight’s Sacrifice by Nita Court
Published February 1st 2017
www.nitaround.com
Review copy courtesy of the author
249 pages
