Posted by Kristen has made a ton of progress recently and we will be posting more cuts tomorrow, but for now, let’s celebrate a semifinalist. This is a third in a series but I think this reads just fine as a stand alone, (I may have read it but I’m holding my review until everything has gotten a review and we are ready to co-review semifinalists). I hope you all give this a chance because it’s super neat!
The Definition of Vengeance by Kevin Wright
This is the story of Sir Luther Slythe Krait, a knight who is more or less a mercenary for hire. In this story, he’s stuck in the village of Untheim, which has a problem: people have been disappearing and then turning up dead, and a young girl just disappeared. It’s his job to figure out what happened to her.
I enjoyed this book quite a lot! I read all of it in one sitting, in one night, as it’s pretty short and it’s paced well enough that it’s quite a fast read. It was full of action and mystery, and although I did pretty much guess at what the ‘big problem’ was, more or less, it still figured out ways to reveal the mystery in an engaging way.
This book is technically the third in a trilogy, however it never felt necessary to have read the books before it. I’ve read the first, but not the second, and I never felt that there was detail or backstory missing for Krait or his companion Karl. It just so happened to be the third story about the same character, set in a different time and place than the two before it.
Krait is still snarky AF and I am still here for it. This book uses language and vernacular that definitely would not have been used at the time that this book takes place (like… 1300s Europe, I think?) but the snark it allows the MC to come up with makes this super not a problem for me, though I know it will cause problems for some.
All told, I liked this one quite a lot. Enough to want to circle on back to book two and see what other shenanigans this dude’s gotten into that I’ve missed out on. I’d give The Definition of Vengeance 8/10 stars, and I declare it…. My first semifinalist!