Django Wexler’s fantastic flintlock fantasy saga continues in The Guns of Empire, the fourth installment of The Shadow Campaigns. With only one volume remaining before Wexler closes off this powerful and engaging saga, he continues to push boundaries within the genre expectations, and push his story forward in a compelling and powerful fashion. Publisher blurb follows the cover image:
As the “audacious and subversive” Shadow Campaigns novels continue, the weather is growing warmer, but the frosty threat of Vordan’s enemies is only growing worse…
As the roar of the guns subsides and the smoke of battle clears, the country of Vordan is offered a fragile peace…
After their shattering defeats at the hands of brilliant General Janus bet Vhalnich, the opposing powers have called all sides to the negotiating table in hopes of securing an end to the war. Queen Raesinia of Vordan is anxious to see the return of peace, but Janus insists that any peace with the implacable Sworn Church of Elysium is doomed to fail. For their Priests of the Black, there can be no truce with heretics and demons they seek to destroy, and the war is to the death.
Soldiers Marcus d’Ivoire and Winter Ihernglass find themselves caught between their general and their queen. Now, each must decide which leader truly commands their loyalty—and what price they might pay for final victory.
And in the depths of Elysium, a malign force is rising—and defeating it might mean making sacrifices beyond anything they have ever imagined.
There will be spoilers as this is a review of the fourth book in the series. A series that does not lose any steps in quality with each book and makes strides with each page turned.
The main action sees Janus and Marcus leading the military campaign against their enemies, Queen Raesina trying to maintain her position as queen, and Winter Ihernglass in the middle of much of the novel. Wexler pulls out a few surprises while remaining consistent to what came before, building extremely well on each of the previous three novels.
Marcus’s trust in Janus continues to be one of the strongest relationships in the series, and why the Vordani Military has been running such a successful military campaign. For all that we’ve seen of Janus bet Vhalnich over the course of the preceding three volumes, he is still very much a mystery to readers and the characters themselves. When he suffers an injury, a very small crack opens into the doorway of his past, but raises only more questions. Often characters shrouded in mystery work best when that mystery remains unresolved, but there’s still an itch to learn more about that character. While I would like to see more about who Janus is and why he came to be the man he is, I hope too much isn’t revealed in the final volume of this five-book series.
For me, I found Winter’s journey through the ranks in the previous volume to her role as the one of the heads of the largest military force the world of the books has ever seen has been wonderful. Her heart was broken in the previous novel. The previous volume, The Price of Valor, ended with quite a bombshell which provides a tense undercurrent to the entire volume. That is, Winter’s lover, Jane, thought to be dead was forced to be the host of a powerful deamon – by her captors and major antagonistical group of the series, the Priests of the Black. Winter simply thinks her former and first love is dead.
On top of losing her lover, trying to hide who she is from a significant portion of the military (including her superior Marcus), she’s adjusting to her role of leadership. She’s emotionally scarred and beginning to show signs that the toll of stress, leadership and war are taking from a physical perspective. She doesn’t sleep and barely eats to the point that the Girls’ Own, the primary battalion she leads, begins to grow concerned for her. This all plays out as empathetic with a wonderful level of believability. Oh yeah, the Girls’ Own is all women and portrayed as an extremely effective, trustworthy military unit in the Vordanai.
The other central character in the military, Marcus, pushes forward, trying to balance his loyalty to the Queen Raesina as her subject and the man who saved his live, his commander Janus. Although there’s hints of a potential conflict between the Queen and Janus, it doesn’t move too far beyond ideological conflicts of how to handle what appears to be the closing of the war. Marcus is caught completely in the middle and again, Wexler gives this the emotion everybody caught between two loyalties might feel, but adds the gravitas of what a potential national imbalance to which this pulling of Marcus could potentially lead.
Raesina is such a wonderful character, too. Quite a few writers have portrayed royal characters with a depth of emotion and complexity beyond just the crown they were. Django does that in spades, but few characters, royal or no, come across so believably self-aware of who they are and what they represent as does Raesina.
In this fourth book, Wexler’s playing board slightly widens, but only by small logical steps. He keeps much of the story focused on interpersonal interactions with a smattering of bombastic battle scenes. It’s a fine balance that works well. Each volume has also increased the fantastical/supernatural elements in the background of what was going on in the forefront of the battle lines. By the end of The Guns of Empire, that dark supernatural element shows a greater importance that seems to lay a great deal of anticipatory groundwork for the final volume.
The Shadow Campaigns has consistently been an impressive series for how well it delivers on so many levels of entertainment, as well balancing tropes and upsetting expectations. Equally impressive is how with each volume, is that the series shows how Django Wexler has grown from a promising writer/storyteller to a reliable, powerful voice in the genre.
Highly, highly recommended.
Roc, August 2016
Hardcover, 465 Pages
http://djangowexler.com/
Review copy courtesy of the publisher, Roc
