2015 historical fantasy, fifth in the Order of the Air series. Late
in 1935, Alma, Lewis and Mitch are showing off the new Catalina at an
air show in Palermo, while Jerry is across the Med in Alexandria
following magical hints to the lost tomb of Alexander the Great.
So the basic idea of this series is Mercedes-Lackey-style pagan
magicians saving the world, combined with heroic aviation pioneers. In
other words the authors aimed it squarely at me. And while it
certainly isn't perfect, much of the time it works. In the first three
books, anyway.
But they took a couple of years off before releasing volumes 4 and 5
in the same year along with a single-volume edition of the first
three, and to me at least the spark has gone. This time the magical
and aviation stories don't blend at all: Jerry does magical
archaeology, while the others end up flying their Cat on a supply
mission to embattled Ethiopia (before the League of Nations has
shrugged and said "not our problem, guv"), and they meet only briefly
and in passing.
There's some attempt to pep things up with cameos for Italo Balbo,
Hermann Göring and Rudolf Hess at the air show, but none of them rises
beyond the historical basics. Count Carl Gustaf von Rosen shows up as
a possibly Nazi-allied flyer, which if you've never heard of him might
seem plausible (he's Göring's nephew-by-marriage, after all), but I'm
the sort of reader who has. Similarly, most of the material on the
Italo-Ethiopian war could come straight from the Wikipedia page; it's
fine to start with something like that if you then pastiche it up into
an interesting story, but as presented it's disappointingly bare.
There's also a remarkable lack of threat or opposition. During that
delivery run our heroes see some fighters in the distance and try to
hide from them, and later some of them get into fighters of their own
to try to repel an Italian air raid, but that's it. In the sewers of
Alexandria there's some physical challenge (Jerry lost a leg below the
knee in the war, and the practicalities of dealing with this situation
on 1930s prosthetics have always been one of the stronger points of
the series), but similarly no actual opposition, and having found the
Tomb they decide to leave it hidden because clearly War Is Coming and
they don't want it to be part of a Triumph in Rome. Staci, left behind
in Palermo to care for the children and because the authors seem to
have lost interest in her, merely burgles Hess's hotel room.
There are a couple of reliable tricks to telling side stories in a
well-documented history with which you want to keep consistent, if you
also want some degree of tension. Option one, you can say "if this
evil scheme comes off, things will be So Much Worse than they
otherwise might be"; then our heroes foil the evil scheme and the
historical version happens. Option two, you can make many of the
consequences hidden, quite easy when you're dealing with secret magic
that the history books won't record, or just make them small-scale
enough that they're unnoticeable on the big historical scale even
though they're still important in people's individual stories. Scott
and Graham do none of these things; they want their characters
participating in big historical events, but they also want to make
sure this world's history reads very much like that of our own, and
the result is strangely flat. This was easier when it was the late
1920s and early 1930s, but they chose to roll the timeline forward to
get into the explicitly approach-of-war stuff…
Which flatness means I'm not distracted by the story from noticing
that a book needs more of an editorial pass than a run through the
spellchecker. If you want to convince me you've done your research on
ritual magic, you probably shouldn't spell the tarot card's name as
"Heirophant". (This also betrays that you don't know any Greek, which
a ritualist really ought to.) If you want to convince me you've done
your research on aviation, you need someone who knows that the
aircraft company is spelled Bréguet, or at least Breguet (though they
are a mere watchmaker), not Breuguet. And even if it were Breuguet,
it's not also Breugeuet and Brueguet. The spellchecker function for
"this word is OK, but don't add it to the general dictionary" is
"Ignore All", at least in LibreOffice…
The book ends with "To be continued in: FIRE SEASON", but there's been
no sign of it in the six years since this came out.
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