Benedict Jacka’s Alex Verus, an unaffiliated mage whose magic specialty is divination, has an established backstory of his former apprenticeship to a particularly nasty Dark mage that he broke away from after a particularly dark period in his life.
The fourth book in the series, Chosen, has that past come back to haunt him. SPOILER-FREE review after the cut.
Benedict Jacka’s Alex Verus often refers to himself as a not particularly powerful mage in a world where many mages, particularly battlemages, could easily clean his clock in a lethal manner. Why then is he still alive?
Because his magic gift is seeing potential futures. Review and some SPOILERS after the cut.
I got the chance to return to Benedict Jacka’s fun Alex Verus series recently with the second book, Cursed. Review with some potential spoilers after the cut.
Picturing a fantasy setting might give a person of supposedly sound mind an image which revolves around something that came from the mind, pen, or fever dream of J.R.R. Tolkien, even if the person in question thinks that name belongs to a particularly odd Muppet. Or perhaps the idea is more of some sort of Game involving Thrones. Maybe King Arthur came off his flour bag to do his thing with Merlin or Galahad or people with names way cooler than anyone else you may know, provided you don’t know any chimps of the Link family (though, to be fair, he is a rather secretive chimp).
But fantasy usually just boils down to magic and the supernatural, and if The Ring taught us anything, and it didn’t, it is that magic and the supernatural can exist anywhere, which is where the Urban Fantasy subgenre comes in.
Gabbing Geek 