About time I got around to writing this review as the book has been sat on my desk for the past few days and I'm only 120 pages away from finishing the next book I started after finishing this one. The Shattered Mask by Richard Lee Byers is a Forgotten Realms novel, and the third book in the seven part Sembia series. Each book in the series (apart from the first which is an anthology of short stories) is by a different author and is centered around one member of the wealthy Uskevren merchant family. I previously read Shadow's Witness which is the 2nd book in the series. This one is set several months later and features the matriarch of the family, Shamur Uskevren.
A popular saying is that football is a game of two halves. Well the same thing can basically be said about this book, in that the second half of it is so different from the first half, that it might as well be a seperate book entirely. The first half of the book is a fairly dull read and the plot is entirely predictable. To say I was disapointed would be an understatement. Byers is one of my favourite authors and I had a hard time believing that he wrote what I was reading. the second half though is another entity altogether, fast, furious and action packed, very much more his writing style and it is clear that with this part of the book that the author is in his element.
The story focuses on Shamur Uskevren, stately matriarch of the family, estranged wife of Thamalon and mother to Tamlin, Talbot and Thazienne. She has a big secret, which I'm going to state here. Doing so does not in any way spoil the novel, as this is mentioned in the first chapter anyway. Shamur isn't who everyone thinks she is. She was not the lady Shamur Kern who was romanced by Thamalon when he was trying to rebuild his houses fortunes many years ago. That girl was poisoned and killed mere days before her wedding. Taking her place was her aunt, also called Shamur Kern, who half a century before had been an adventuress and burglar. Only on one of her adventures she'd gotten caught in a magical backlash and frozen in time... for more than 50 years.
When she returned to the timeline she found everyone she knew long dead and went back to her family, to find the Kern's on the brink of financial ruin, their only lifeline being an impending wedding between the young Shamur (who bore an uncany resemblance to her "late" aunt) and Thamalon Uskevren. And then of course the girl died. Since no-one knew of her return, Shamur the Elder took the younger Shamur's place and entered into a loveless marriage to save her family. Unfortunately, one of Thamalon's enemies has pierced her masquerade and manipulates her into trying to assassinate her husband, by implying that it was Thamalon who poisoned her niece.
This enemy is a wizard (and his shadowy familiar) who wears a moon mask to cover his face. He is a foe that Thamalon killed years back, and who has now returned from the Nine Hells themselves to exact revenge on his slayer and who decides to dupe Shamur into doing his dirty work for him. That in a nutshell is the first half of the book. A convoluted revenge scheme which invariably fails to work and which sets up the second half of the book, where to coin a phrase "all hell breaks loose".
Seeing that subtley won't win him his desire to see the Uskevren destroyed, but mistakenly thinking Shamur and Thamalon already dead, the wizard resorts to brute force and overwhelming numbers to try and wipe out the Uskevren heirs. The fight scenes are masterfully written, full of energy and a joy to read. While their children dodge conjured monsters and hired blades aplenty (and do some maturing and a lot of squabbling too in the process), Shamur and Thamalon play detective to try and figure out just who the moon-masked wizard is and why he wants them dead, racing against time to discover his identity before he succeeds in exterminating their children. All the while the pair have to come to terms with the decades that Shamur has been deceiving her husband in her false identity, which makes for some amusing and also poignant banter between the pair.
I'm going to give this book 3/5. If the whole book had been written as well as the second half is, then this novel would have easily scored full marks. While I can see why the book is written as it is, that didn't make reading the first half any more entertaining.
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