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Irissa and Kendric #2
Exiles of the Rynth
Irissa, last of the Torloc sorceresses, had been betrayed by the rainbow gate that was supposed to lead her to the haven world of her vanished people. The hand of Kendric, companion and Swordsman of Rule, had been torn from her grasp. Then the gate had rejected her into this strange world where a cold moon hung forever unmoving in the sky.
Now she was a prisoner of the Stonekeeper Sofistron. Around her encircled the pale walls of her cell, filled with half-seen reflections of herself. She was helpless, all her power drained into those other-self images. And this time, there was no Kendric to save her. He was a swordless exile in the Rynth, stranded among the Unkept women and the rim-runner outlaws from the magic Stonekeeps.
Somewhere, she knew, there had to be another gate, a way out from this hostile world. Somewhere, somehow...
Now she was a prisoner of the Stonekeeper Sofistron. Around her encircled the pale walls of her cell, filled with half-seen reflections of herself. She was helpless, all her power drained into those other-self images. And this time, there was no Kendric to save her. He was a swordless exile in the Rynth, stranded among the Unkept women and the rim-runner outlaws from the magic Stonekeeps.
Somewhere, she knew, there had to be another gate, a way out from this hostile world. Somewhere, somehow...
344 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published June 12, 1984
275 people want to read
About the author
Carole Nelson Douglas
167 books567 followersCarole Nelson Douglas is the author of sixty-four award-winning novels in contemporary and historical mystery/suspense and romance, high and urban fantasy and science fiction genres. She is best known for two popular mystery series, the Irene Adler Sherlockian historical suspense series (she was the first woman to spin-off a series from the Holmes stories) and the multi-award-winning alphabetically titled Midnight Louie contemporary mystery series. From Cat in an Alphabet Soup #1 to Cat in an Alphabet Endgame #28.
Delilah Street, PI (Paranormal Investigator), headlines Carole's noir Urban Fantasy series: Dancing With Werewolves, Brimstone Kiss, Vampire Sunrise, Silver Zombie, and Virtual Virgin. Now Delilah has moved from her paranormal Vegas to Midnight Louie, feline PI's "Slightly surreal" Vegas to solve crimes in the first book of the new Cafe Noir series, Absinthe Without Leave. Next in 2020, Brandi Alexander on the Rocks.
Once Upon a Midnight Noir is out in eBook and trade paperback versions. This author-designed and illustrated collection of three mystery stories with a paranormal twist and a touch of romance features two award-winning stories featuring Midnight Louie, feline PI and Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator in a supernatural-run Las Vegas. A third story completes the last unfinished story fragment of Edgar Allan Poe, as a Midnight Louie Past Life adventure set in 1790 Norland on a isolated island lighthouse. Louie is a soldier of fortune, a la Puss in Boots.
Next out are Midnight Louie's Cat in an Alphabet Endgame in hardcover, trade paperback and eBook Aug. 23, 2016.
All the Irene Adler novels, the first to feature a woman from the Sherlock Holmes Canon as a crime solver, are now available in eBook.
Carole was a college theater and English literature major. She was accepted for grad school in Theater at the University of Minnesota and Northwestern University, and could have worked as an editorial assistant at Vogue magazine (a la The Devil Wears Prada) but wanted a job closer to home. She worked as a newspaper reporter and then editor in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. During her time there, she discovered a long, expensive classified advertisement offering a black cat named Midnight Louey to the "right" home for one dollar and wrote a feature story on the plucky survival artist, putting it into the cat's point of view. The cat found a country home, but its name was revived for her feline PI mystery series many years later. Some of the Midnight Louie series entries include the dedication "For the real and original Midnight Louie. Nine lives were not enough." Midnight Louie has now had 32 novelistic lives and features in several short stories as well.
Hollywood and Broadway director, playwright, screenwriter and novelist Garson Kanin took Carole's first novel to his publisher on the basis of an interview/article she'd done with him five years earlier. "My friend Phil Silvers," he wrote, "would say he'd never won an interview yet, but he had never had the luck of you."
Carole is a "literary chameleon" who's had novels published in many genres, and often mixes such genre elements as mystery and suspense, fantasy and science fiction, romance with mainstream issues, especially the roles of women.
Delilah Street, PI (Paranormal Investigator), headlines Carole's noir Urban Fantasy series: Dancing With Werewolves, Brimstone Kiss, Vampire Sunrise, Silver Zombie, and Virtual Virgin. Now Delilah has moved from her paranormal Vegas to Midnight Louie, feline PI's "Slightly surreal" Vegas to solve crimes in the first book of the new Cafe Noir series, Absinthe Without Leave. Next in 2020, Brandi Alexander on the Rocks.
Once Upon a Midnight Noir is out in eBook and trade paperback versions. This author-designed and illustrated collection of three mystery stories with a paranormal twist and a touch of romance features two award-winning stories featuring Midnight Louie, feline PI and Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator in a supernatural-run Las Vegas. A third story completes the last unfinished story fragment of Edgar Allan Poe, as a Midnight Louie Past Life adventure set in 1790 Norland on a isolated island lighthouse. Louie is a soldier of fortune, a la Puss in Boots.
Next out are Midnight Louie's Cat in an Alphabet Endgame in hardcover, trade paperback and eBook Aug. 23, 2016.
All the Irene Adler novels, the first to feature a woman from the Sherlock Holmes Canon as a crime solver, are now available in eBook.
Carole was a college theater and English literature major. She was accepted for grad school in Theater at the University of Minnesota and Northwestern University, and could have worked as an editorial assistant at Vogue magazine (a la The Devil Wears Prada) but wanted a job closer to home. She worked as a newspaper reporter and then editor in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. During her time there, she discovered a long, expensive classified advertisement offering a black cat named Midnight Louey to the "right" home for one dollar and wrote a feature story on the plucky survival artist, putting it into the cat's point of view. The cat found a country home, but its name was revived for her feline PI mystery series many years later. Some of the Midnight Louie series entries include the dedication "For the real and original Midnight Louie. Nine lives were not enough." Midnight Louie has now had 32 novelistic lives and features in several short stories as well.
Hollywood and Broadway director, playwright, screenwriter and novelist Garson Kanin took Carole's first novel to his publisher on the basis of an interview/article she'd done with him five years earlier. "My friend Phil Silvers," he wrote, "would say he'd never won an interview yet, but he had never had the luck of you."
Carole is a "literary chameleon" who's had novels published in many genres, and often mixes such genre elements as mystery and suspense, fantasy and science fiction, romance with mainstream issues, especially the roles of women.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
April 2, 2015
Part two of a forgettable trilogy
18 January 2013
Here is another of those fantasy books that have pretty much disappeared into obscurity on the grounds that it was really nothing special. As I generally say, unless I can actually remember the book (and the title helps a lot; the only reason I remembered this book was because it followed on from another book that I saw in a second hand bookshop one day and my memory was triggered) then it is highly unlikely that I would consider the book to be anything special. Hey, I can't comment on the author because she has published sixty more books than I have ever published, but that does not necessarily mean that I have to read the books, or even recommend other people read them.
Now, about the plot, we have the last sorcerer who is something called a Trolloc (but I don't think it has any connections with the Trollocs from Wheel of Time, and despite the fact that the name makes them sound ugly, I am doubtful that they are actually ugly, but then again they may be) and a warrior that is the member of an exclusive caste of warriors, but he has done something to upset them, so he is now a loner. Together, they go on a quest (I wonder what the quest was about, though I am not all that keen on finding out) to save the world, but that does not stop the fact the magic is going away.
I sort of wonder about this magic going away thing because it sounds as if the physical lores of the particular world are changing dramatically, and if the magic is going away, is it possible for this world to survive? One thing I can say is that if all of the sources of energy that we use (which is our magic) were to suddenly dry up then our entire society would collapse. Let us see, we need large amounts of oil to plant seeds, to harvest wheat, to process wheat, and to get the wheat from the farm to the supermarket. So without oil I guess we are all going to starve. Well, not all of us, but the price of food will skyrocket (and I suspect that our massive cities will become unsustainable).
Now, for those of us who actually believe in magic (I do) can we say that magic has gone away from this world. Well in a way it has but in a way it hasn't. Ignoring the fact that the source of our magic is oil, and that technically the definition of magic is something that cannot be explained by science, I still believe that spiritual forces are at play in our world. Hey, I don't believe in that lovey dovey, fairy tale type of magic, I believe in the Elric of Melnibone type of magic, which involves summoning demons and hoping they don't tear you a new one.
Anyway, there are still large tracks of the world where people still live as they have lived for centuries, and despite our modernist disbelief of the spiritual world, they still live in fear of spirits and the spirits still have control over their lives. Even in our modernist society we still have people playing at witches, and some are deadly serious about it as well. However, it all comes down to what C.S. Lewis describes as Satan's two most powerful tricks: making people believe that demons are everywhere, or convincing them that they do not exist at all.
18 January 2013
Here is another of those fantasy books that have pretty much disappeared into obscurity on the grounds that it was really nothing special. As I generally say, unless I can actually remember the book (and the title helps a lot; the only reason I remembered this book was because it followed on from another book that I saw in a second hand bookshop one day and my memory was triggered) then it is highly unlikely that I would consider the book to be anything special. Hey, I can't comment on the author because she has published sixty more books than I have ever published, but that does not necessarily mean that I have to read the books, or even recommend other people read them.
Now, about the plot, we have the last sorcerer who is something called a Trolloc (but I don't think it has any connections with the Trollocs from Wheel of Time, and despite the fact that the name makes them sound ugly, I am doubtful that they are actually ugly, but then again they may be) and a warrior that is the member of an exclusive caste of warriors, but he has done something to upset them, so he is now a loner. Together, they go on a quest (I wonder what the quest was about, though I am not all that keen on finding out) to save the world, but that does not stop the fact the magic is going away.
I sort of wonder about this magic going away thing because it sounds as if the physical lores of the particular world are changing dramatically, and if the magic is going away, is it possible for this world to survive? One thing I can say is that if all of the sources of energy that we use (which is our magic) were to suddenly dry up then our entire society would collapse. Let us see, we need large amounts of oil to plant seeds, to harvest wheat, to process wheat, and to get the wheat from the farm to the supermarket. So without oil I guess we are all going to starve. Well, not all of us, but the price of food will skyrocket (and I suspect that our massive cities will become unsustainable).
Now, for those of us who actually believe in magic (I do) can we say that magic has gone away from this world. Well in a way it has but in a way it hasn't. Ignoring the fact that the source of our magic is oil, and that technically the definition of magic is something that cannot be explained by science, I still believe that spiritual forces are at play in our world. Hey, I don't believe in that lovey dovey, fairy tale type of magic, I believe in the Elric of Melnibone type of magic, which involves summoning demons and hoping they don't tear you a new one.
Anyway, there are still large tracks of the world where people still live as they have lived for centuries, and despite our modernist disbelief of the spiritual world, they still live in fear of spirits and the spirits still have control over their lives. Even in our modernist society we still have people playing at witches, and some are deadly serious about it as well. However, it all comes down to what C.S. Lewis describes as Satan's two most powerful tricks: making people believe that demons are everywhere, or convincing them that they do not exist at all.
January 14, 2019
Okay. Look. This book is probably trash. From what I remember, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that it was, in fact, trash.
And yet to this day, if I ever caught sight of it in a used bookstore, I would throw my money down so fast I might slam-dunk a hole in the counter.
I don't know why, I don't know how, all I know is that this little story about the properties of rocks was everything little!me wanted and reading it again would probably taste like warm cocoa with marshmallows in it.
ETA: I did find it, finally, in a used book-store, and threw down my money and read it like it was going to save my life. It did not! But it sure was wonderfully familiar and quirky - a great story more about worldbuilding than plot, which might be why it stuck in my head so long. I'm glad I found it again.
And yet to this day, if I ever caught sight of it in a used bookstore, I would throw my money down so fast I might slam-dunk a hole in the counter.
I don't know why, I don't know how, all I know is that this little story about the properties of rocks was everything little!me wanted and reading it again would probably taste like warm cocoa with marshmallows in it.
ETA: I did find it, finally, in a used book-store, and threw down my money and read it like it was going to save my life. It did not! But it sure was wonderfully familiar and quirky - a great story more about worldbuilding than plot, which might be why it stuck in my head so long. I'm glad I found it again.
October 16, 2017
This is a fun, light-hearted story that continues the adventures of Irissa and Kendric started in Six of Swords. The characters of interesting and the world building unique.
Read
October 23, 2025Irissa, last of the Torloc sorceresses, had been betrayed by the Rainbow Gate that was supposed to lead her to the haven world of her vanished people. The hand of Kendric, companion and Swordsman of Rule, had been torn from her grasp. Then the gate had rejected her into this strange world where a cold moon hung forever unmoving in the sky. Now she was a prisoner of the Stonekeeper Sofistron. Around her encircled the pale walls of her cell filled with half-seen reflections of herself. She was helpless, all her power drained into those other-self images. And this time, there was no Kendric to save her. He was a swordless exile in the Rynth, stranded among the unkept women and the rim-runner outlaws from the magic Stonekeeps. Somewhere, she knew, there had to he another gate, a way out from this hostile world. Somewhere, somehow...
December 15, 2025
Okayyyy, so this was the second book in the duology that I'm named after and it was definitely a downgrade from the first book.
First off, I thought that the exclusion of the talking cat from the first book really decreased the enjoyment of the book. The talking cat provided some sass and humor in the first book as well as fun interactions with both Irissa and Kendric. I found them both to be much more boring characters without the talking cat.
Also, I didn't really love the plot of this book. It was more boring and I felt like they just kept moving between locations. I wasn't really ever super invested in the journey taken in this book.
The new world was interesting enough though.
I'm glad to be finished with this series but I won't be checking out the sequel trilogy.
First off, I thought that the exclusion of the talking cat from the first book really decreased the enjoyment of the book. The talking cat provided some sass and humor in the first book as well as fun interactions with both Irissa and Kendric. I found them both to be much more boring characters without the talking cat.
Also, I didn't really love the plot of this book. It was more boring and I felt like they just kept moving between locations. I wasn't really ever super invested in the journey taken in this book.
The new world was interesting enough though.
I'm glad to be finished with this series but I won't be checking out the sequel trilogy.
November 10, 2017
great book
February 25, 2010
I remember liking this book but not as much as the first - I think there were a few things going on I didn't understand at the time. I'll read it again after Six of Swords.
March 31, 2011
sure seems like there should be a #3
April 21, 2015
Another favorite of my youth. Good adventure, stresses team work amongst the very differently abled & minded. Great storyline, moves along well. Will be buying another copy of it soon.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews