Just finished reading The Iron Ghost by Jen Williams.  I admit it upfront – I loved it.  The Copper Promise was on my top 10 list for 2014 and I wondered how this would compare and it’s just brilliant so beware – there will be gushing aplenty below.

The Iron Ghost picks up a few months after The Copper Promise left off.  Our favourite threesome, flush with their previous success, are now in great demand – they call themselves the Blackfeather Three.  At the start of The Iron Ghost, after a few months break from each other whilst sorting out their own affairs, they’ve been hired to retrieve a stolen item.  Now, clearly things are not going to go according to plan, even assuming there was a plan in the first instance!  There are all sorts of complications – not least of which the awakening of the most powerful, dangerous and psychopathic mage ever to have lived who having been resurrected is hellbent on finishing the project he was working on before he was killed! Oh dear.

I won’t go further into the plot – you can rest assured that a huge metric shit load of crap is going to be unleashed and whilst not directly responsible our intrepid trio are going to go rushing into the fray yet again.  Just hold onto your hats because this has bucket loads of imagination, oodles of fun and cartloads of personality.

The Copper Promise brought to us three wonderful characters in Sebastian, Frith and Wydrin, aka the Copper Cat.  I love characters that grab my attention and feel real and these three certainly took me by storm.  The Iron Ghost raises their profile further.  The characterisation is just excellent and in this instalment we spend a little bit more time with Sebastian and Frith than in the first book giving them both a little more depth in the way that Wydrin was fleshed out originally.  That’s not to say that we don’t spend time with the Copper Cat!  She’s her usual maniac self, filled with almost child like curiosity about all things with a complete lack of self preservation all rolled up with her rum drinking, swashbuckling, sword fighting and devil may care attitude that actually hides her true softer interior.

Then there is the setting.  We journey to a completely different part of this fantastic world where the imagination is resplendent.  Skaldshallow where the Skalds and the Narhls are at war.  Two entirely different races of people.  One a cold race of people who believe in the soul of the mountain and live with a close affinity to nature that lends them a certain sort of magic and the others that mine the mountain and craft strange stone creatures called Werkens. The Skalds believe that Werkens are little more than basic structures that they control themselves using chips of the heartstone which they also mined.  The Narhls think the Skalds are abusing the mountain and nature itself and that they truly do not understand the soul contained within both.  The Narhls and Skalds are at war, both believing that they are protecting their own way of life and what is most important to them.  Neither of them have the faintest idea of the destructive force that is about to be unleashed.

The plot is fast paced and inventive, we jump from one action sequence to the next and the story also gives us flash backs to what our trio got up to after book 1.  I particularly enjoyed Sebastian’s sections of the book where he tries to come to terms with his own newfound nature having shared blood with a dragon and the army of green skinned women that he seeks to tame in order that they might survive.  The Brood army call him father and look up to him and in return he certainly does his best to curb their savage nature so that they might become more acceptable to humankind.  Of course they naturally stand out and their inherent nature as predators oftentimes kicks in before Sebastian can intervene causing terrible problems.

Everything builds up to a fantastic grand scale finale with zombie-esque creatures, demons and death aplenty!

I cannot stress how much I enjoyed this book, really.  It’s a pretty huge chunkster but it’s chock full of goodies.

I want you all to read it!  It’s epic, it’s fun, it’s tense, it’s original and it’s pretty damned awesome and on top of that I think that Ms Williams has come up with a few characters here that I just love.  I literally care about them and that’s what makes a read gripping.  At the end of the day you can have a unique world and a great plot but if the readers don’t care about what happens to the characters then there will be no emotion and that’s what makes reading so enjoyable.  It’s the ups and downs, the gasps, the laughs the shocks and the sudden relief or even sorrow.

I hope you’ll give this a go – it’s such a good series.

I received a copy of this via the publishers through Netgalley and I’m damned glad I did!  My thanks and appreciation.  The above is my own opinion.

My review of the Copper Promise is here.