Lucy's Blade

✍ Scribed by Lambshead, John

• Publisher: Baen
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: en-GB
• Weight: 229 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781416555773

✦ Synopsis

From Publishers Weekly

British author Lambshead, a research scientist with many technical papers to his credit, takes an imaginative premise for his first novel, a fantasy set mainly in Elizabethan England, but falters in the execution. After court wizard John Dee, with the aid of Lovecraft's Necronomicon , summons a demon thatpossesses Lucy Dennys, "a lady of gentle breeding... fair of face and bonny of character," Dee attempts to kill Lucy with his dagger. Sir Francis Walsingham, Lucy's uncle and the queen's spy chief, intervenes just in time, and the dagger later serves as a talisman for Lucy as she faces assorted challenges, including a plot against the queen's life. Rather than presenting the period from the point-of-view of the people living in it, Lambshead intrudes with anachronistic commentary ("Even a small cut could kill in a world without antibiotics") as well as historical exposition ("Elizabeth was the third great Tudor monarch, after her father Henry VIII and grandfather Henry VII"). Hopefully, any sequel will be less heavy-handed. (May)
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From

British marine biologist Lambshead alternates the setting of his first historical fantasy involving a magical court of Queen Elizabeth I and twenty-first-century England. In the elder milieu, alchemist John Dee, at the behest of Sir Francis Walsingham, summons a demon to gain knowledge of plots against the queen. The demon escapes confinement and possesses Lady Lucy Dennys, Walsingham's niece. Fortunately, the demon is more just an ancient spirit and not venomously evil, and Lucy's subsequent adventures, plus those of her twenty-first-century counterpart, Dr. Alice Harding, occupy the rest of the book. Unfortunately, the whole shebang is based on an idiotic plot device: despite exhaustively described precautions against the demon's escape, Lucy is possessed by it because no one locked the door of the experiment chamber. Tad much to swallow. The swashbuckling heroines and twin romantic subplots do compensate, perhaps sufficiently for plenty of romantic, feminine readers. Roland Green
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