Vi has three days to read a book. She, a novice of the Chantry sisters, is the only one who can read it; when anyone else tries, it appears to be nonsense. Locked in a library, she reads Kylar's narrative that starts with him breaking into Count Repha'im's estate in search of revenge. Kylar is almost immediately in over his head, since he hasn't been paying attention to politics. The queen has been claiming to have prophetic dreams about disaster befalling her infant children, and the King convinces Kylar to watch over the children while he and the queen go on a vital diplomatic mission. The infants are kidnapped, and Kylar agrees to find an artifact that might help retrieve the children. Vi learns more than she'd bargained for about Kylar's emotional state--although the only thing the Chantry cares about is the location of an artifact Kylar possesses. Kylar and Vi's stories are part of a vibrant if unstable fantasy world, and fans of this kind of massive epic will find plenty to enjoy between the political machinations and Kylar's occasionally long-winded but entertaining voice.

Weeks cleverly continues the fantasy saga begun in his Night Angel trilogy with the exciting launch of the Kylar Chronicles spin-off series. Assassin Kylar Stern's magic powers include a kind of immortality; he's automatically restored to life when killed, but someone he loves then dies in his stead. He's introduced while breaking into a heavily guarded estate to kill twisted artist Trudana Jadwin, the woman who murdered Stern's foster sister, Magdalyn, and turned her corpse "into a perfectly lifelike statue made of undecaying flesh." Following the end of the war that dominated the previous series, Jadwin is slated to benefit from a general royal amnesty declared by High King Logan Gyre, and Stern's resolved to forestall that unjust outcome. This effort proves to be only the prologue to a more complex mission: the rescue of the monarch's infant twins, possibly with the help of a magical artifact that Stern must locate first. Weeks keeps the plot moving, despite the book's length, and makes it easy for newcomers to get engaged in this world. Fantasy fans who like roguish antiheroes will want to check this out. Agent: Donald Maass, Donald Maass Literary. (Apr.)