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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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The Smooth Men resolution was problematic, but...I don't know whether it's better or worse (more tropey) that by my read, they didn't "not kill him" because they felt sorry for him or murder him because it was The Only Way (although it pretty clearly was). Instead, it felt to me like they didn't kill him because they weren't -sure- it would solve what really was a serious problem (the Smooth Men had gone viral, duplicating them and spreading throughout the lands, murdering as they went), but they didn't want to murder someone if there was another way, and couldn't be absolutely sure killing him would end the problem. And, of course, the end was very much The Trope, but a very half baked one; despite having said several times it would have been more expedient, they can't expunge their progagonism to commmit murder, forcing him to See the Horror and take it of their hands.
I'm not sure, given that she wanted a Sympathetic Cause (which was a contrast to the speculation that it was an evil cult in Grace) how it could have been made better. Having the potter NOT be suffering brain damage would help a lot; just have him be innocent and in love with/abused by his own creation, until he realizes the Awful Truth in act three. Making him more of a character would probably also make his tropey sacrifice mean something. We have a through-line here of him bringing galatea to life, then the increasing abuse cycles, then a half-formed attempt to end it followed by more abuse and near abandonment, and finally resolve and a final sacrifice, but the whole thing is made more muddy and hapless by the dementia.
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I think I would have preferred the evil cult to the way this played out, tbh; in addition to the problem of the brain damage, the fact that we don't meet the creator until the back third of the book and the protagonists don't really have a reason to be invested in him means the whole thing feels sort of late and disconnected to the actual emotional arc of the plot anyway.