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T. Kingfisher's Paladin romance novels are very easy-to-read stress-relief books, so I keep buying them and zooming through them in a night or so even though the by-now-well-established Kingfisher romantic schtick of "the hero simply Cannot Stop thinking about shoving his face in the heroine's Magnificent Breasts" does not have any particular direct appeal.
In the latest, Paladin's Strength, Istvan, another one of the berserker paladins of a dead god featured in Paladin's Grace, teams up with Clara, a Lay Sister with a Secret, on a double mission to track down a serial killer and rescue Clara's kidnapped nun friends. I will not tell you what Clara's Secret is, but her convent is the Order of St. Ursa, so ... you know. There are Clues.
Kingfisher describes this romance as a slow burn. I'm not actually sure I would agree with that description -- IMO, if both parties are already constantly thinking lustful thoughts and have already smashed faces at least once by the 33% mark, it's not what I personally would call a slow burn even it takes them a while to determine motive and opportunity for the full horizontal tango -- but I do really appreciate that a major cornerstone of the appeal for both of them is not "sexy height difference" but "sexy height similarity." Nothing against sexy height difference but this is a rarely seen and refreshing variation! Clara and Istvan are both firmly Tall 4 Tall and I respect this for them!
I also do very much still like the concept of berserker paladins whose god is dead and have to deal with what it means when you suddenly have to take personal responsibility for Being Very Scary instead of outsourcing it over to a god, and the fact that we get multiple books about them to show different people having different thoughts about that and ways of dealing with it.
Anyway, as an overall read I enjoyed this one more than Paladin's Grace, with one fairly significant caveat: like sophia_sol discusses in their review, I did not love the reveal that the evil clay-golem serial killers were accidentally created by a sad Ambiguously Neurodivergent And/Or Disabled man who just wanted somebody to love, in large part because it then follows that the Only Solution is for this man to die to stop his evil creations from wreaking further havoc. Especially did not love the part where our heroes don't kill him when they first meet him because they feel sorry for him, and then when their initial plan goes wrong are like "well, our compassion was a mistake, it's unfortunate but to prevent the subsequent murders we really should have just killed him at the time."
I also raised my eyebrows a little at Kingfisher's claims about the general unstoppable-killing-machine nature of bears, but as everyone knows I don't know very much about mammals and I'm sure Kingfisher knows more so it's entirely possible that she's a hundred percent correct.
In the latest, Paladin's Strength, Istvan, another one of the berserker paladins of a dead god featured in Paladin's Grace, teams up with Clara, a Lay Sister with a Secret, on a double mission to track down a serial killer and rescue Clara's kidnapped nun friends. I will not tell you what Clara's Secret is, but her convent is the Order of St. Ursa, so ... you know. There are Clues.
Kingfisher describes this romance as a slow burn. I'm not actually sure I would agree with that description -- IMO, if both parties are already constantly thinking lustful thoughts and have already smashed faces at least once by the 33% mark, it's not what I personally would call a slow burn even it takes them a while to determine motive and opportunity for the full horizontal tango -- but I do really appreciate that a major cornerstone of the appeal for both of them is not "sexy height difference" but "sexy height similarity." Nothing against sexy height difference but this is a rarely seen and refreshing variation! Clara and Istvan are both firmly Tall 4 Tall and I respect this for them!
I also do very much still like the concept of berserker paladins whose god is dead and have to deal with what it means when you suddenly have to take personal responsibility for Being Very Scary instead of outsourcing it over to a god, and the fact that we get multiple books about them to show different people having different thoughts about that and ways of dealing with it.
Anyway, as an overall read I enjoyed this one more than Paladin's Grace, with one fairly significant caveat: like sophia_sol discusses in their review, I did not love the reveal that the evil clay-golem serial killers were accidentally created by a sad Ambiguously Neurodivergent And/Or Disabled man who just wanted somebody to love, in large part because it then follows that the Only Solution is for this man to die to stop his evil creations from wreaking further havoc. Especially did not love the part where our heroes don't kill him when they first meet him because they feel sorry for him, and then when their initial plan goes wrong are like "well, our compassion was a mistake, it's unfortunate but to prevent the subsequent murders we really should have just killed him at the time."
I also raised my eyebrows a little at Kingfisher's claims about the general unstoppable-killing-machine nature of bears, but as everyone knows I don't know very much about mammals and I'm sure Kingfisher knows more so it's entirely possible that she's a hundred percent correct.
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Since I assume this is normal novel length, I generally agree; I have read fic I would confidently call slow-burn even though they started kissing a third of the way through, but where "a third of the way through" is after 100k+ words.
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