I’ve been enjoying making my fellow /r/Fantasy mods jealous by my ARC of The Liar’s Knot more than I should. But it’s been so easy to do, and so much fun, that I couldn’t resist. The Mask of Mirrors was one of the better books to come out last year, and pretty much everyone who has read it is eager for the sequel. Happily, I can report that I consider The Liar’s Knot even better than The Mask of Mirrors, and I loved The Mask of Mirrors. Full credit to M. A. Carrick (better known as Marie Brennan of The Memoirs of Lady Trent and Alyc Helms of The Adventures of Mr. Mystic) for avoiding Middle Book Syndrome.
This book is every bit as full of intrigue, fashion, flirtation, and swashbuckling as the first book was. And it is exceptionally well titled. Character A has secret identities B and C. Character D has secret identity E. D knows that A is also B and C. A knows both D and E, but doesn’t know that they’re the same person. A knows that E knows they are also B and C, but as far as A knows D knows none of this, and D/E wants to keep things that way to protect D’s secret identity as E. A (in their identities as A, B, and C) is allied with E, but while A is at least civil towards D, A is also (in their public persona) at least mildly antagonistic towards E.
And that’s just two of the characters. I think I got all that right. Observant readers of The Mask of Mirrors can probably parse it out if they want to put in the effort.
You’d think this would be horrible to read, but it isn’t. What makes this bearable, and even delightful, to read is that poor Ren, Grey, Vargo, and all the rest are even more confused and frustrated by this tangle (a liar’s knot, one might say) than the reader could possibly be.
The fact that D/E is crushing on A/B/C, and that A/B/C is crushing on both D and E separately (remember, A/B/C doesn’t know D and E are the same person), is just extra spice.
One of the most frustrating things as a reader is when characters that could trust each other don’t. We readers have an advantage here: we’re often in the heads of everyone in the story, so we know their motivations and their secrets. The people in the story do not have that advantage, and so we readers are often left fuming at how quickly problems could be worked out if the characters would just talk to each other. (My fellow Wheel of Time lovers are all nodding right now.) That kind of thing works (as far as it does) with Rand and Elayne because they’re generally hundreds of miles away from each other; it’s not sustainable when they’re in the same room. And since this book takes place in a single city, with characters that are intimately involved in each other’s lives whether they like it or not, this is simply unsustainable.
Happily, Brennan & Helms don’t try to sustain it. When the knot unravels, they don’t force it to hold together. But when circumstances force characters to talk to each other, or when someone decides to roll the dice and actually trust someone, it happens. Not with everybody, and not with everything. Everyone still has secrets. But the whole thing is so goddamn SATISFYING to read.
All that is the character side of things. The plot itself also proceeds well. We learn much more about the Rook: the reason they exist, how they’ve been around for centuries, and what they are actually trying to do (the Rook has a much deeper purpose than simply tweaking the noses of the nobility). We learn much more about Vargo and his mysterious helper spirit voice. And we learn much more about the oft-mentioned Tyrant and the history of Nadezra.
The book doesn’t end with a cliffhanger (which is good, because I hate cliffhangers), but it does end in such a way that leaves me even more eager for book 3 than I was for book 2. Hopefully the good folks at Orbit will bless me with an ARC of that one as well.
Comes out on December 9th. Mark your calendars; this is a good one.