Legacy of Wolves, by Marsheila Rockwell


I thought that this book was going to begin with one of my least favorite literary devices ever, the Irrelevant Tertiary Characters Who Get Slaughtered Mysteriously And Then Are Never Heard From Again, but I was wrong.

The gist: the city of Aruldusk is having a problem with mass-murder. And since Aruldusk has problems with what the experts call "ethno-sectarian competition" nowadays, blame quickly affixes on the local despised minority, a group called the shifters. The shifters appear to be standard-model humans with minor animalistic traits such as claws, fangs, fur, etc.* Unfortunately, popular imagination tends to equate the shifters with lycanthropes (viz, werewolves), who are immune to conventional weaponry and go on rampaging murder-fests every full moon or so. (Since the world of Eberron apparently has twelve freaking moons, this rather quickly becomes a problem.)

So this leads to Irulan, a truculent, tactless shifter woman desperately trying to free her brother Javi, now rotting in prison under suspicion for the murders. The murky currents of Eberron politics force her to team up with Andri, a knight of the Church of the Silver Flame who has some serious psychological baggage of his own**, and a dwarf named Greddark who serves as an "Inquisitive", which seems to be Eberron-speak for a private investigator.

It starts off sluggishly, but the book develops into quite a satisfying murder mystery. I thought to myself several times "Self, I see where this book is going" only to be proven wrong, and the red herrings don't look red from a distance. Eberron is also a sorcerer's psychedelic steampunk hallucination of a world, and Rockwell manages to unreel that world, and the characters' places therein, without resorting to chapters of infodump.

So, good book. If Rockwell writes something else I'll read it.

-JM

*I almost thought of furries, but I nobly restrained myself.

**Think Oedipus meets The Wolfman.