This was provided by Netgalley in exchange for a honest review.
"The list of things I don’t know would fill a book - no, several. Still, I’ll show you how someone who knows nothing can accomplish anything."
Asher Hearst is a college student, an avid drinker, a cliché ladies lover, but before anything he’s an immortal. And that sucks.
Self proclaimed investigator for the supernatural community (even thought he doesn’t know scraps about it and doesn’t seem to care), he founds himself avoiding a thousand of years of punishment but refueling an ageless war between the catholic Inquisition and the heretics (a.k.a. the supernatural creatures) by rescuing a covent of witches from the angry warrior priests.
And burning their church to the ground.
And killing a couple of them.
The Inquisition is livid that the supernatural community didn’t punish Asher. Yes, because you see for some reason, even if those guys are hunting and murdering all the "heretics" they can found, the said heretics thought it was a good idea to invite them in their council and give them rights during their trials. Logic.
But Asher is not the kind of guy to let himself worry over such small matters as a massive looming war. Nope. Actually, he decides this is just the time for him to pay a visit to the fae realm in order to find good ol’ mom who abandoned him long ago. Again, logic.
And just like that our hero takes off and finds himself to the bottom of the ocean where he is rescued conveniently by someone who’s going to conveniently (repetition intended) need Asher to do something for him in the exact location where our dear immortal needs to go next.
Yes, you see our little Ash-boy, in his first day in a magical city he knows nothing about, manages to find his fae step-sister who gives him three tasks in which he’ll need to succeed before she lets him meet with his mother. To sum up that part, Asher makes tons of fae enemies, beats the crap of a legendary creature, beds a princess after she might or might not have raped him (I’m still not sure about what the fuck happened in that part), gets the princess to want to marry him, finds a lost great treasure of the realm, cure a plague, finds the missing first king… Blah blah blah.
Then he gets back to the real world after several months away with rapey-princess and - oh, surprise - this is war ! And most of his friends are missing. Dang ! Who could have seen that coming ?
If my summary wasn’t clear enough, I got bored to death.
This was all over the place, I mean what’s with the first rescue-the-witches mission, then the fae part, then the war… This got way too long and when picking up a book to continue it becomes a hassle, you know there’s a problem. Especially since there were a lot of times when I got no clue what was going on, sometimes I reread the dialogues three times and still couldn’t figure what had been decided or explained in it.
Asher is one of those James Bond/Dirk Pitt/Indiana Jones kind of character (and don’t get me wrong, I got nothing against them, quite the opposite), in a younger, more magical version which kind of failed to find its own originality or personality. Shame.
As for the rest of the characters, well, I couldn’t bring myself to care about any of them and they tended to balance between pure stereotype and utter plainness.
The plot tried to include every possible legendary creatures you've ever heard of and again, it gets way too much, even more since the structure of the book feels so fragile with no real thread linking the big, middle fae part to the rest.
This is really too bad because the set up had me quite intrigued and it seemed really promising… But it didn’t live up to it in my opinion.