It's A Wonderful Death: A Fortannis Novel

by Derek Beebe, Michael A. Ventrella (Editor)

A brave knight breaks her vows to fight against a lunatic king calling himself "the Doomsayer" and ends up dealing with unreliable henchmen, political assassins, and a sarcastic disembodied head in a bag. Can she and her friends save the Hidden Kingdom from an unstoppable foe before her prophesied death? "It's a Wonderful Death" is a stand-alone novel in the shared fantasy world of Fortannis. The story takes place after the novels "Arch Enemies" and "The Axes of Evil" and features Terin Ostler and the squires from those stories.

280 pages, Paperback

Published September 26, 2016

About the author

Derek Beebe was first published in 2015's A Bard Day's Knight and his first full length novel was 2016's It's A Wonderful Death. He is a co-host on the Sci-Fi Pubcast podcast (http://scifipubcast.libsyn.com/). He once spent an agonizingly long period as a high school history teacher (three whole months!) before settling into a boring career in banking. He lives in Pennsylvania and his web page is www.DerekBeebe.com.

Reviews

[Jared Hart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall, this was a very entertaining fantasy novel. The humor in it had me chuckling quite often. There were also many twists and turns as far as the plot goes. The character Elmeki definitely stole the show for and I would love for some more stories to be written on him.

[Randal Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book! Full disclosure: I worked with the author on a podcast, and was therefore able to read the book with his voice in my head. This gave me some insights into his sense of humour, and allowed me to detect when he was “winking” at his audience. Even without this inside info, though, readers will get a kick out of this one. Plenty of fun and adventure.

[Will Davidson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. I am not familiar with the shared fantasy world of Fortannis where the book is set, but that did not impede my enjoyment of the story. I was particularly impressed with the plotting - the story took several unexpected turns which made it stand out from other similar books that I have read. It ended up being a more intriguing book than I had expected at the start and without giving anything away the author retained his capacity to surprise right up until the end.
The characters were nicely developed and I would not object to spending more time in their company. I also liked some of the unusual world-building. If I was being super critical there were a couple of strangely out of place phrases - at one point early on a character thinks of their helper as a "good Samaritan" even though as far as I know Fortannis has no shared history or religious connection to Earth. But that is a really minor point and did not stop me from enjoying the book very much.

[Randal Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book! Full disclosure: I’ve worked with the author on a podcast, and therefore read the book with his voice in my head. This gave me some insights into his sense of humour, and the ability to know when he was “winking” at his audience through the text. But even without this inside info, readers will get a kick out of this one. Plenty of fun and adventure.