Twisting the Rope

Black Dragon #2

by R.A. MacAvoy

The Campbell Award–winning author’s follow-up to Tea with the Black “Wow! MacAvoy’s done it again” (Anne McCaffrey, New York Times–bestselling author).   Mayland Long, aka the Black Dragon, has been enjoying a peaceful relationship with Martha Macnamara—but suddenly they face threats from seemingly every side. A wild psychic force is loose in the world; Martha’s three-year-old granddaughter has been kidnapped; and one of her Celtic musician friends has been found dead, hanging by a rope of twisted grass. Now the Black Dragon must use his wits to rescue the little girl and hunt for a killer . . . even if it brings him to a horrifying realization.   In this novel, the author of The Book of Kells returns to the modern-day California of Tea with the Black Dragon, blending fantasy, mystery, Chinese lore, and a timeless love story as she so masterfully did in her debut, which earned nominations for Nebula, Hugo, World Fantasy, and Philip K. Dick Awards. “MacAvoy supports her tale with a superbly drawn cast of characters . . . and her usual superior command of language” (Booklist).  

Genres: Fantasy, Mystery, Urban Fantasy, Fiction, Dragons, Science Fiction Fantasy, Ebooks

200 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Roberta Ann (R. A.) MacAvoy is a fantasy and science fiction author in the United States. Several of her books draw on Celtic or Taoist themes. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1984. R. A. MacAvoy was born in Cleveland, Ohio to Francis and Helen MacAvoy. She attended Case Western Reserve University and received a B.A. in 1971. She worked from 1975 to 1978 as an assistant to the financial aid officer of Columbia College of Columbia University and from 1978 to 1982 as a computer programmer at SRI International before turning to full-time writing in 1982. She married Ronald Allen Cain in 1978.

R.A.MacAvoy was diagnosed with dystonia following the publication of her Lens series. She now has this disorder manageable and has returned to writing. (see http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/non...)

Reviews

[Peter Tillman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I recall liking this one much less than her "Tea with the Black Dragon" --which I loved-- but that's about it. Likely read in the late 1980s.

[Rindis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tea With the Black Dragon had crime/mystery as part of its central thread, and in this sequel, it's basically the main plot in classic '80s fashion, with a murder, no clear sense of who could have done it, plenty of police involvement as the main characters try to figure out the whodunnit, and a long confession of past misdeeds as part of the end.

Like the first book, there's some fantasy here in an undercurrent, and it does have plot ramifications, but is never focused on. In fact, if you know nothing of the first book, you'll probably spend a long time waiting for a reveal on Mayland Long that will never happen here.

Instead of Silicon Valley, this is more of a period (now) piece on the music scene as the action revolves around a small band as part of the Celtic revival of the '80s that is finishing up a tour. Martha has pulled the group together, Mayland is acting as manager, and tempers are frayed at the end of a long trip.

The worst thing is that the Open Road Media version of the text for the book is in horrible shape, and obviously hasn't had anyone go through it at all for clean up, as problems crop up from the very beginning, including Long's name not being capitalized at one point. (Interestingly, about 2/3s through is in better shape than the start, and it gets worse again towards the end.)

[megan · Rating 2 out of 5]

It felt like I was missing pieces of the story. Some topics were so overly described and others not enough.

[Kat Hooper · Rating 3 out of 5]

Will review soon at www.fantasyliterature.com.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as compelling and driven as Tea with the Black Dragon. Other than Oolong, it was hard to really care about the other characters. The ending did not flow from the previous action.

What was the most distracting, however, was the quality (or lack of it) of the digital version. Someone seemed not to have read it at all, ran a spellcheck and a bad character recognition software program. I've done some proofreading in my career, and this was painful: commas popping up in the middle of sentences, words that made no sense in context, lots of apostrophes randomly appearing. And it needed a deep copyedit as well. A shame.

[Anthony Buck · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quite an odd book. It's a sequel that has very little in common with its predecessor in style or content, and even the characters in common seem quite different. Almost as if the writer wrote a totally separate story then decided it would sell better if it was a sequel.

None of which would matter if it was a good book, but it isn't really. It's quite unoriginal and plodding. Shame.

[Claudia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unlike MacAvoy's later books, this one turned into a mystery with very little fantasy. I had higher hopes for the sequel to "Tea with the Black Dragon" and, although the main character was duplicated, he was somewhat domesticated and taken down a notch by a head cold.

[Amanda · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF. Managed about 30 pages, but the amount of typos, grammatical errors, spelling mistakes etc was obscene. It was so frustrating and ruined the flow, so I gave up, which is a shame, because I loved the first book.

[Charlee · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nowhere near as good as Tea with the Black Dragon. Uninteresting supporting characters with way too much time spent on them. Uninspired dialogue. The most interesting and main character of the previous book, Mayland Long, spent the entire book sneezing and coughing with a bad cold. Disappointing.

[Ian Banks · Rating 3 out of 5]

2025 reread: the main problem with this book is that it it is a different kind of story to Tea With The Black Dragon. It’s an unlikely sequel - despite Martha being a musician - and reads more like another novel that has been co-opted into a Black Dragon story. Having said all that, I do like it: the plot twists a little in ways that I can keep up with and understand and the characters are delightful and engaging, all having motives to murder their bandmate, like in the best mysteries. It was unfairly reviled on publication, possibly because it was as different from anything that Ms MacAvoy had written before as each of her previous novels had been. It’s not a bad book, just not as good as her others.

[Joseph Carrabis · Rating 1 out of 5]

Twisting the Rope was recommended to me by a friend who knows I study folklore and speak Gaelic.
I'm tempted to disown that person as a friend.
The opening scene is slap-dash constructed, the characters are introduced in rapid succession without any reason to care about them as a group or individually, there's no clear indication of why I or any other reader should care.
But who knows. You might like it.

[Mars · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unlike MacAvoy's other works, this one was fairly tough to chew.

The story started out very slow, too, although it picks up sometime after the middle of the book.

I'd advise to skip this one.

[Yve · Rating 3 out of 5]

To an even greater degree than Tea With the Black Dragon, Twisting the Rope is more of a mystery novel with supernatural touches than a true fantasy novel. Yet both books are persistently classed as fantasy - even the man at the bookstore where I got it told me it was a "nice little fantasy." It's confusing. It's written in a fairly simple style with a strong 80s feel and I would never call it a groundbreaking genre-blending masterpiece, but there are a lot of intriguing elements in both books that made me keep reading. First and foremost, Martha Macnamara and Mayland Long are lovable heroes. And it kind of appeals to the part of me that loves Murder, She Wrote and seeing Jessica Fletcher solve cases and flirt effortlessly with the inevitable suave WASPy older gentlemen - except these novels don't limit themselves to the upper crust of society. Martha is a fantastic fiddle player, zen teacher, and mother/grandmother who is super cool because she's so unaffectedly un-cool and "on the slope side of fifty" hence past taking shit from people. And her odd-couple romance with Mayland, of the genteel aristocratic affectations and detached human experience, is just charming. This book deals with the end of a stressful eight week tour for Martha's Irish traditional band, and we see the meeting of new-age California culture and dysfunctional would-bev hippies/drug dealers with folk revivalists and "world" music against the backdrop of Santa Cruz - again, EXTREMELY 80s. So recommended if you like murder mysteries, near-past nostalgia, and just being along for the ride.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Not all the strange old things are gone.”

This sequel to Tea with the Black Dragon, was published in 1986. This story belongs more to the mystery genre than fantasy and is set in Santa Cruz. Martha Macnamara and Mayland Long are leader and road manager respectively of a five-member Celtic band nearing the end of an eight week tour. Their three year old granddaughter Marty has joined them for a week and Mayland has been assigned to watch over the child while the band performs. However when one of the band members turns up dead, suspicion falls on everyone and Martha pledges to find who's responsible and what happened.

This novel doesn't come up to the level of the previous one. While the prose is good and the mystery is complex, the characters aren't as well crafted and the narrative isn't as tightly constructed. The ending is quite drawn out and I found myself impatient that it wasn't being wrapped up quickly enough. It's a decent story but less interesting than I had expected.

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the second installment in R. A. MacAvoy’s Black Dragon Duology, and it is set about five years from the events of “Tea with the Black Dragon.” Our two main characters, Mayland Long and Martha Macnamara, are touring the country with Martha’s traditional Celtic band when one of the band members is found dead, hanging from a hand twisted grass rope made by two of the other band members. Was it murder? Was it suicide? Our characters need to find the truth before the police make some wrong assumptions.

Although this book is classified as fantasy, there are few fantastic elements to the story. It is mostly a detective story, a murder mystery. However, the wonderful characterizations and descriptive scenes make it fascinating. I stayed up way past my usual bedtime to finish the last half of the book! The band members make an excellent supporting cast of characters, all of whom are interesting and have some depth. Like “Tea” it is a very different and unique story, and that is something that fantasy needs more of. In a way, it isn’t really very dependent on “Tea” as it only shares the main characters from that work.

[Midu Hadi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quick-look at the Book

A touring band with secret and not-so-secret enmities and resentments among its members. A mystery. A possessed child. And a very sick dragon. These are the ingredients that make up this cozy mystery.

Thoughts on this Book

The pacing is so very off! We know details about what the band has for lunch--curry and a huge salad, if you wanna know. But we don't find out exactly when the dragon's mysterious illness began.

I liked how that one constable displayed signs of PTSD on discovering a body in gruesome condition.

I guessed the two main players because of how remotely they interacted.

The book has all the classic signs of the guy being offed hated universally, and there being no dearth of suspects.

I did wonder if a real cop would let a person suspected of manslaughter just walk out of the station--when they're also a flight risk.

The supernatural element--possession--wasn't explored or explained well, either.

There's no dragon-ish anything. Why have a dragon in the story then?

Thoughts on the Series

If you can make a book featuring a dragon sound boring...but there are just 2 of them and they're short!

Review of Book 1

[Kyrie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was just good enough to keep me reading it, and so weird I wondered why almost every page.

Martha and Mayland have been involved for five years. Elizabeth has a daughter, Marty. She's convinced Martha to watch Marty for a few days (considering how unfondly Elizabeth remembers her traveling musical childhood it's an odd choice). Marty keeps running off looking for Judy - but who Judy is, no one seems to know.

There's a lot of Irish and Chinese words thrown in with no explanations. I spent a lot of time on Google trying to figure them out and losing the plot (in all senses) while doing so.

Everyone in the band has something off or unsavory about them. The explanation at the end cleared some things up, but dang! I am disappointed. Great titles. Bewildering stories.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not quite as much fun as the first of these three books, though this one had a new bit of fun with the Irish phrases tossed about as the story followed a group of musicians playing traditional Irish music on the road. All of which I carefully noted for my own studies! There is a mystery, a death or two, some physical violence between characters - and the Dragon semi-emerges in pursuit of solutions and a resolution. I'll probably pick up the last book in these series at least to see what else the author can do with these characters and what kind of story they tell in that one.

[Caerigna Lunalti · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun little mystery, with a touch of the more fantastic and preternatural sides of its characters. As well written as the first, and no less worth reading for being the 'sequel.' Only a few editing and/or printing errors. suggested, as with the first book, for any 18+ reader. Not due to rating, or any of that. Rather due to getting the most out of it. The more hard knocks schooling you've had the more relatable this series, most especially in this second book.

[Rena Sherwood · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sequels are harder to write than the originals, since there are no expectations with the originals. R. A. MacAvoy just lost the plot here ... both literally and metaphorically.

This had none of the magic or charm of the original. It's not quite a fantasy, not quite a mystery ... and way, way, WAY too many unpronounceable Celtic references.

So, what is this book, then?

Shit. That's what it is.

[Gloriamarie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagine my surprise after reading Tea with the Black Dragon over and over for decades to discover the was a sequel. Even after haunting bookstores, scanning the shelves for more by this author, I still somehow missed this.

I really enjoyed it, good to see Martha and Wayland again. Complicated mystery, really fooled me.

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite book of hers, but still a great author!

Well i really loved the first in this series - Tea with the Black Dragon - what a lovely story that was! Sorry to say, this one was pretty scattered and not nearly as well written - the last quarter of the book was the best and more up to the author’s usual eloquence of language and plot. Still one of my favorite authors!

[BRT · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book more than the first in the series. There's an undercurrent of otherworldliness running through both books and you are never quite sure why. Is he a dragon or isn't he? In this book, Martha and Long are traveling with her Celtic band and her granddaughter. There are tensions in the group and her granddaughter is acting strangely.

[Milady133 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Entertaining read, but the language resulted a bit difficult for me (English is not my first language) and the typos in the electronic edition made it even more difficult to read.
Also, the book is a mistery, the fantasy where it gets classified because of the author main writing genre is just a side paragraph at most.

[AcidGirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe I am a bit stuck in the modern conventions of telling a story, maybe I don't get the philosophical undercurrent well enough, but the two MacAvoy stories I read felt like more work to read than either contempory fantasy or mystery - or mash-ups. I like the dream-like feel of the book and that it sticks out in tone and style, but I am still not excited about reading more. Mmh.

[Ricky Foos · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recall sharing this novel with a housemate who was also an admirer of MacAvoy. Months later she told me, "I've finally finished Twisting the Rope." I looked up from what I was doing, puzzled, and finally asked, "what rope were you twisting?" This is a sequel to Tea With the Black Dragon, though I don't remember it being as good as the original.

[Ellen Herrmann · Rating 1 out of 5]

Whoever proofread this book should look for another job. There were missed quotations, punctuation and capitalizations. I was happy when I was finished reading this because the storyline was not very satisfying.

[Frances Carson · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's awful. I'm going to return it if possible. I only got thru about 5 or 6 chapters and most of the characters are detestable. It's confusing and boring. I liked The Grey Horse and expected to be similarly charmed. To bad.

[Jane · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to read this as it was supposed to be a sequel to Tea With the Black Dragon, which I really liked. This book had no relationship to that book. I almost quit a few times because it made no sense, and was rather boring until the bitter end.

[Bruce Turner · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not quite as charming as Tea With Black Dragon, and harder to get through, but still a good story.