The Office of Shadow

✍ Scribed by Matthew Sturges

• Publisher: Pyr
• Year: 2010;1944
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 305 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 1616142022

✦ Synopsis

Midwinter has gone, but that cold season has been replaced by a Cold War in the world of Faerie, and this new kind of war requires a new kind of warrior. Seelie forces drove back Empress Mab at the Battle of Sylvan, but hostilities could resume at any moment. Mab has developed a devastating new weapon capable of destroying an entire city, and the Seelie have no defense against it. If war comes, they will almost certainly be defeated. In response, the Seelie reconstitutes a secret division of the Foreign Ministry, unofficially dubbed the "Office of Shadow," imbuing it with powers and discretion once considered unthinkable. They are a group of covert operatives given the tasks that can’t be done in the light of day: secretly stealing the plans for Mab’s new weapon, creating unrest in the Unseelie Empire, and doing whatever is necessary to prevent an unwinnable war. The new leader of the "Shadows" is Silverdun. He’s the nobleman who fought alongside Mauritane at Sylvan, and who help complete a critical mission for the Seelie Queen Titania. His operatives include a beautiful but naïve sorceress who possesses awesome powers that she must restrain in order to survive, and a soldier turned scholar whose research into new ways of magic could save the world, or end it. They’ll do whatever is required to prevent a total war: make a dangerous foray into a hostile land to retrieve the plans for Mab’s weapon; blackmail a king into revolting against the Unseelie Empire; journey into the space between space to uncover a closely guarded secret with the power to destroy worlds.

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From Publishers Weekly

If 2009's Midwinter was the Dirty Dozen in Elfland, this thrilling sequel is Magical Mission Impossible. Former lothario Silverdun becomes a priest, but finds himself bored. When his government recruits him as a spy, he takes the offer and is shocked when they demand he learn extraordinary physical and magical skills. Silverdun, scholarly former soldier Ironfoot, and deadly empath Sela are assigned to discover the origin of Einswrath, the city-killing weapons unleashed in the previous Seelie/Unseelie war. Standard spy tropes—training sequences, double agents, betrayals from within—take on new life when melded with high fantasy, and Sturges has an easy ear for dialogue and character. Silverdun's backstory is nicely fleshed out in the process, though fans of the first book should be warned that the other characters appear briefly or not at all. (June)
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About the Author

Matthew Sturges’s works include the comic book series House of Mystery, Shadowpact, Justice Society of America, Blue Beetle, and the Eisner Award-nominated Jack of Fables, co-written with Bill Willingham. He is the author of the novel Midwinter, and his short stories have been published on RevolutionSF and in the anthologies Live without a Net and With Great Power. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and two daughters. Visit him online at www.matthewsturges.com and www.clockworkstorybook.net

Library : Fantasy
Formats : EPUB
ISBN : 9781616142025