Reviewed by Chris

TITLE: Prisoner of Shadows

SERIES:  Lords of the Underworld #2

AUTHOR:  Sam Burns & W.M. Fawkes

PUBLISHER: Self-Published

LENGTH: 273 pages

RELEASE DATE: May 9, 2019

BLURB:  

For more than five thousand years, Prometheus has been chained in the underworld. Every day, an eagle tears out his liver. Every night, he heals. When Hermes releases him in a gambit to save himself from his father’s wrath, Prometheus must adjust to a world that’s forgotten him. Hunted by the twins, Artemis and Apollo, he finds help in an unexpected place.

Julian Bell is a vampire lost. He left his Louisiana home in 1936 and hasn’t settled since. Ten years ago he followed his best friend to New York, but the country they came to wasn’t the America he left. After losing his friend, he found himself unmoored in a strange land. As he nears his hundredth birthday, he’s realizing how truly alone he is.

When Prometheus and Julian’s paths cross one fateful night, they find in each other a safe path through the shadows.

REVIEW:  

Thousands of years chained to a rock while a your liver is eaten daily from your still living body is not a great way to live. For all that you could call that living. But when Prometheus is freed by Hermes, the freedom is short-lived and bittersweet. Now on the run from Artemis and Apollo–on the orders of their very annoyed father, Zeus–Prometheus must try to take in as much life as possible before he is dragged back to the rock and the sharp beak. Strange that he would find the most and best of life in the arms of a man no longer living.

Nearly a century has passed since Julian lost his life, and began his un-death, on the killing fields of World War I Europe. Yet even with all the strange things he has seen in is long time on earth, he is surprised to find the world has a few more secrets to unveil. Namely the presence of real Greet gods walking among the mostly unaware populous. Now to keep Prometheus safe he must decide if he can risk the city and people he is oath-bound to protect, or if he must once again watch the world as he knows it go up in flames.

Even after only a short scene in Prince of Death (book one in Burns and Fawkes’ Lords of the Underworld series) I was eager to hear more about Prometheus. He is certainly not the most used character in most modern Greek-god retellings, so I didn’t know a whole lot more the basics about him going into this story. But the premise sounded interesting, and I was curious how the authors planned to integrate vampires into this fascinating alternate universe they created.

Happily I can report that I came away feeling satisfied on almost every level.

The twists on Greek mythology and Vampire lore were familiar enough to not be jarring, but unique enough to make me relish every new facet of their revelation. Prometheus and Julian made a very good fit for each other, bringing each other a sense of safety, but also challenging each other to grow. The choices made in the story by the characters to further the plot never came across as utterly ridiculous or just thrown in there to move the characters from point to point. You grew to care for the secondary characters, so when things happened to them, or they made dumb-ass decisions, you felt sympathy and dismay right along with the main characters.

It was a pleasure to read from front to back.

My only real quibble is that the two antagonists didn’t really work as well as they could have. Zeus is (was, and always shall be) a massive dick. But I pretty much expected that. I just wish his part of the story–especially near the end–had a bit more oomph. His exit left me feeling a bit underwhelmed, to be honest, and since that was pretty much the climax of the story, I was left feeling not as pumped up as I hoped. The other antagonist, which shall remain nameless for spoiler reasons, worked better for me, since they had more page time to build up their character, but I never quite got enough sense of why they were doing what they were doing. “They wanted power” is a kinda bland motivation for me. I wish the authors had given me a bit more than that to work with.

They did a decent job of keeping the story interesting, though, so I’m not faulting that part of the writing too much.

That being said, after these first two books I have to admit that I am completely sold on this world. I find it utterly fascinating, and the excerpt for book three, coming out later this summer, has me really excited. And with this book reading almost as a standalone, new readers can easily jump into this story to discover the world for themselves as well. Though, I honestly find the first book as good, if not a tad bit better, than this one so I would totally recommend you just jump back to book one and start there. The world building you would garner from that would probably be helpful as well. But no matter how they read this series, I think readers will find themselves pleasantly surprised and wholeheartedly in love with these stories.

RATING:

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