The Vengeance Of Legion by Helen Fields

I'm not quite sure how this book crept up on me, after being really disappointed in the first of the series I was not looking forward to reading this one but thought I should before I forgot all the ins and outs of Manitu and it's resident tribes.  I have never been so glad to be proved wrong by a book.

There is little time spent trying to make Eve and her environs seem "normal" and we are plunged almost straight in to the action via the murderous Moroi, the footsoldiers of the Perelynsk.  Eve spends far more time in Manitu this time around and the flowery descriptions are long gone.  It is now a war torn world and the descriptions of the violence and upheaval are glittering and, in some cases exceptionally gruesome.  It is here that we see the development of Ms Fields in to a thriller writer.  This book has more to do with that genre than the fantasy.  Strip away the fantastical beings and settings and much of it could almost be from a police procedural.

The characterisation is far stronger this time around.  My only issue is with how easily Eve's friends and acquaintances take to her explaining she is not Human and is actually Vilya and that there is a whole other world running parallel to our known one.  Not once does any one of them call for the men in white coats or suggest that maybe she needs to speak to someone.  They all take it at face value.  If there had been a little more suspension of belief from those characters I may even have marked it higher.  I can forgive the rather bizarre surgical episode, even though it left me with more questions - first and foremost if Eve is a healer when in "our" world then why did she leave him stapled up and not just heal him?

Much stronger writing and although it touts a third volume I am sure that there is little to no chance of that occuring.  I can full see why as there is not too much mileage from Eve and Perun's "arrangement", Zora's recovery and James' banishment.  We are pretty sure that Eve will overcome Perun (most likely with his mother Mandalina's aide), repair the damage to Manitu and still manage to return to the Human World to marry James.  No, I'd rather be left here to make my own dreams up about this all unfolds rather than Ms Fields misguidedly trying to complete an old series that is not a patch on her current offerings.

**Review originally published January 7th, 2018**