Asunder

Hardcover, 432 pages

English language

Published Aug. 20, 2024 by Tordotcom.

ISBN:
978-1-250-62543-4
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OCLC Number:
1393205166
ISFDB ID:
3328421
Goodreads:
195791081

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4 stars (1 review)

We choose our own gods here.

Karys Eska is a deathspeaker, locked into an irrevocable compact with Sabaster, a terrifying eldritch being—three-faced, hundred-winged, unforgiving—who has granted her the ability to communicate with the newly departed. She pays the rent by using her abilities to investigate suspicious deaths around the troubled city she calls home. When a job goes sideways and connects her to a dying stranger with some very dangerous secrets, her entire world is upended.

Ferain is willing to pay a ludicrous sum of money for her help. To save him, Karys inadvertently binds him to her shadow, an act that may doom them both. If they want to survive, they will need to learn to trust one another. Together, they must journey to the heart of a faded empire, all the while haunted by arcane horrors, and the unquiet ghosts of their pasts.

And all too soon, Karys …

3 editions

Asunder by Kerstin Hall

4 stars

Someone on these here internets (I wish I could remember who it was) recommended this one and oh boy was it right up my alley.

The setting is a dark fantasy world after a war in which one culture's gods or "heralds" wiped out the other's. The main character could be right out of a classic cyberpunk story. Down on her luck in her youth she traded her life to one of these heralds for the power to speak to the recently dead, and as the story begins she's waiting for the contract to come due.

In trying to save a man's life she binds him to her shadow and that starts a second ticking clock. Can she find the magic to separate them before one of them consumes the other?

I admit some of the world-building lost me at times. But the characters more than made up for it. …