[Review, Urban Fantasy] The Last Sun (The Tarot Sequence #1) by K.D. Edwards (Pyr, 2018)
In my first DNF at 50% of the year, this wild ride with fun and snarky characters can't save this book from its convoluted plot.
The Last Sun (The Tarot Sequence #1) by K.D. Edwards (Pyr, 2018)
Information
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Demographic: Adult (General Audiences)
Length: 371 Pages, 13 hours and 18 min
Content Advisory: This work contains mature themes including: sexual content, sexual assault, coarse language, violence, death, child abuse, suicidal thoughts, et al.
Representation: Achillean main characters
Links: Goodreads, Storygraph
Review
In my first DNF at 50% of the year, this wild ride with fun and snarky characters can't save this book from its convoluted plot.
The honest truth is that I wish I had liked this book so I could see where the series would go. But I have so many spoons and I’m not wasting them on pushing through bad books for the sake of it this year.
The first book in The Tarot Sequence, an urban fantasy thriller series, follows Rune Saint John and his Companion Brand as they are hired by Lord Tower to search for Lady Judgement’s missing son, Addam Saint Joshua, on the island city of New Atlantis. Each step of the investigation leads them down a rabbit hole of twists and turns, leading back to Rune’s own past and the fall of The Sun Court.
What I did like about this book was its world concept and characters. Set on a post-apocalyptic Earth on the island of New Atlantis, a city cobbled together from the ruins of human civilisation. New Atlantis is a chaotic mish-mash of buildings cobbled together from all over the world and a blend of modern pop culture and old world hierarchy. It is ruled over by god-like beings who embody aspects of the Major Arcana and Saints who rule with dictatorial force while keeping an uneasy peace between their factions. It’s cobbled-together nature suits its lead Rune, who straddles the line between the upper echelons of society and its lower sections, which have more interaction with humans, as a fallen scion of the now-dead Sun Court turned mercenary. The many modern pop culture and historical references Rune drops show how he is a child of both worlds while making the world familiar yet strange.
Rune is incredibly well fleshed out. Rune is a jaded, snarky character with a strong voice enhanced by Josh Hurley’s excellent narration. He gives incredible insight into his interority as well as the often convoluted New Atlantean society that he exists within. His relationship with his Companion - a human raised along aside an Atlantean child and trained from infancy to defend them, the Companion bond giving them insights into the thoughts and emotional state of their principles - Brandon Saint John or Brand is that of snarky love, they get under each other’s skin, but ultimately are there for each other. A review I read - and wish I could find again - when deciding whether to DNF this book describe the humor in this book as “frat boy jock humor” and I would say that is accurate to Rune and Brand’s relationship and extending into their growing brotherly bond with their ward Mattias (Max). While in their early 30s, they come off as guys who never grew out of the college bachelor lifestyle.
However, every other character introduced, while conceptually interesting, seems shallow compared to our two main protagonists, even when they are vital to the plot. The first secondary character we are introduced to is Mattias Saint Valentine, or Max. The novel starts not with the investigation of Addam’s disappearance, despite this being the main plot, but with a raid on The Lover’s estate, ending with Rune accepting an unknown side mission from The Lady Lovers before her downfall. This side mission, as they learn when they return to Half House, is to raise and protect Mattias Saint Valentine until his 21st birthday. In a normally structured story, this would lead into the A-plot being the investigation into Max and The Lovers and why he was sent to Rune for protection. However, Max seems only to exist within this novel to act as a reflection of Rune - a young scion thrust into an unknown world too early by the fall of his court, who also may have a history as a sexual assault survivor. And his story isn’t deeper delved into - in this book - than tidbits Rune or Brand either pick up on by guessing or investigate off-page. And I struggled to see why introducing him here was relevant to the plot of book 1 if his story is better explored in book 2, when he is given so little to do in the first half that highlights his necessity to Rune and Addam’s story which make up the bulk of book 1’s plot.
Another character I have gripes with is Quinn Saint Nicholas, the younger brother of the missing Addam Saint Nicholas, rather than a fully formed character he seems to act as a get out of jail card for our crew giving them the answers and solutions as needed - rather than letting them and by extension the audience figure it out organically. Quinn’s first appearance, though not the first time he apparently had affected the lives of Rune and Brand, is when Rune and Brand come to New Saints hospital to question Addam’s ailed brother Christian on his disappearance. Appearing seemingly out of nowhere, he then goes on a prophetic ramble that ends with him warning Rune of an impending mercenary attack, where Rune and Brand escape barely, but leave Quinn behind, protected by his sigil shield. After the attack, Quinn, however, is left in a coma, not to worry, he still can direct our friends into favourable outcomes with his friendship with the dreamwalker Ciaran - an acquaintance of both Addam and Rune.
And Quinn is the epitome of the problems of why I ended up dnf’ing this book. Things just happen with no explanation, and we move on to the next location or character. The book never gives readers the time to breathe, and it became the reading equivalent of whiplash, moving from action scene to action scene with lore dumps in between and characters just popping in and out. The story doesn’t meaningfully let our main characters stew in their newfound knowledge or expand or explain anything that it felt like a cobbled-together mess where magic and monsters are pulled out of nowhere in order to serve the needs of the current scene without creating a cohesive world. The solutions to every problem or puzzle just drop into Rune’s lap often by adding new elements when an expansion of or better foreshadowing an already established story element could have worked better.
So much happens in the first 50% of the novel, at such a fast pace for such long chapters, that I often found myself having to pause whatever I was doing and rewind the audiobook to see if I missed something or the scene just suddenly changed again. And the readability wasn’t improved if I switched formats either. It feels like there are about 20 fight scenes just in this first half, most of the time introducing new monsters and magic, and I struggled to keep up. When I got to a part where Rune and Brand are being attacked on the street outside The Tower estate and I couldn’t tell the “good guys” from the “bad guys” I think that was when I just gave up. First the pedestrians are attacking them then they are Lord Towers protection, what the fuck is this plot even doing.
And I’m going to be honest, maybe that’s badly remembered cause half the time I felt like I was tuning out and not invested in the plot at all because it was that hard to follow. And a well-written protagonist with a great character backstory with lots of potential future exploration can’t save a plot that can’t follow its own logic. What logic is there seems to be the obvious points any thriller would point out - the business partners abducted Addam for shares in their company, the sister did it to inherit their mother’s throne. This book feels more like an action spectacle with a mystery tacked on than the detective thriller it is trying to be.
The opening chapter should have been a bigger red flag that I wouldn’t have liked this book than it was because we are dropped right into the middle of the raid on The Lover’s estate and are just supposed to piece together what is happening, the background behind it, and the world from the badly given context clues of Rune’s narration. At this point, I don’t know Rune or about New Atlantis, and I struggled to know why he and, by extension, I, the reader, should care about the raid and its outcome - jokes on me, cause The Lover’s raid wasn’t relevant to the main plot of Book 1 at all.
There are so many cool elements within The Last Sun, but none of them are given adequate attention or time to breathe. A magical society based on the Atlantist myth and Tarot cards & Saints, absolutely cool; Sigil-based magic imbued into objects to create spells or change an object’s aspect, cool; early 30s protagonist with snarky banter, good self-reflection and a strong narrative voice, cool; A mysterious kidnapping of a highly influential heir to a kingdom, cool. When it is not a chaotic, consulted mess, The Last Sun is a compelling action-thriller with plenty of room to further explore in its sequels. But The Last Sun is so chaotic in its execution that I felt crazy just trying to decipher the plot. And this is why it became my first DNF of the year. I could push through and hope that the final act resolved some of my issues - but the looks of the wiki, they don’t - or I could cut my losses here and hope that the next book on my TBR goals for this quarter is less of a disappointment. No secret to what I ended up choosing.
I say if your a fan of like fast paced queer action thrillers and are willing to put up with a lot of the chaotic nature of this work maybe give this one a shot, wait for it to go on sale, but give it a shot. But for me, I’m done with both this book and this series and am moving on to greener pastures for my 2025 reading journey - and probably something a little fluffier as a palate cleanser.
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