Chanticleer Book Reviews

Tag: Political Intrigue

THE SCALES Of BALANCE: A Vengeful Realm Book 1 by Tim Facciola – Epic Fantasy, Sword & Sorcery, Political Intrigue

The Scales of Balance opens with an amnesiac gladiator, a queen certain her husband must die for the sake of the kingdom, and a prince who will do anything to save his father. Tim Facciola’s first novel in the high fantasy series A Vengeful Realm is threaded through with plots of assassination and political intrigue, all fueled by a divine struggle for dominance.

A Vengeful Realm is a study in richness. Its characters, setting, and world-building, the vital elements for a strong fantasy, pull the reader into the land of New Rheynia where the most valuable currencies are loyalty and power.

Facciola excels at characterization, beginning with an engaging tapestry of backgrounds.

The gladiator Zephyrus’ first memories are in a temple hearing the words of a prophecy that he can’t understand. Depending on the interpretation, he could bring peace or destruction. His only guide is his iron morality, which he hopes is enough to bring him back to who he once was.

Prince Laeden discovers a Revivalist plot to assassinate the king. This splinter group is displeased with his father’s handling of mages in New Rheynia, thinking exile and banishment to be too soft of a punishment for those who would blaspheme against the Six Gods of Valencia. But the last person Laeden would suspect is his stepmother, Queen Danella, who plots against King Varros from his marriage bed. And that’s just chapter one.

Facciola’s high-fantasy world feels like a finely tuned watch. As the characters come to life, they move inexorably toward the only choice they truly have.

A study in freedom and free will, the question of what rights and choices the enslaved gladiators who surround Zephyrus have features strongly in the book. With factions vying for control, the Uprising of enslaved who push back against their torment are a prominent force to be reckoned with, and an easy scapegoat for darker and more powerful groups to blame their own enterprises on.

The disgust Zephyrus feels with being a gladiator fighting for the entertainment of a gilded cast is not shared by all of his new brothers in arms. Some resent his prowess with a blade, others ridicule him for spitting on the honor of their house, and still more are drawn to him for what his prophecy might mean for all those forced into bondage.

As the first book in a series, The Scales of Balance lights dozens of fuses that begin to burn and cross over each other. Careful readers who adore titanic fantasy authors like Brandon Sanderson and Robert Jordan will be thrilled at the plots within plots and intrigue behind every move.

With the fate of a kingdom in the balance, tension is sky high from the very beginning. Multiple points of view allow the reader to see how Queen Danella stays one step ahead of her stepson, and the little ways in which Zephyrus and Prince Laeden are able to subvert and close in on her machinations. Death waits around every corner for those who misstep, and each character knows it, uncertain from where the next strike will come or where it will land.

All told, Tim Facciola’s A Vengeful Realm takes its place with the best caliber of high fantasy books.

The story of Zephyrus and the world of New Rheynia isn’t one of might makes right and violence putting evil in its place. It believes a different path is possible, that hope for the future is not just a dream, but a necessary reality to push back against cruelty in power.

The Scales of Balance: A Vengeful Realm Book 1 by Tim Facciola won Overall Grand Prize in the 2023 Chanticleer International Book Awards.

November 13, 2024
VETERANS KEY by Richard Bareford – WWI, Mystery, Historical, Thriller, Florida Keys, Political Intrigue

Veterans Key opens in 1935 as hundreds of derelict vets of the Great War are working in ramshackle government relief camps bridging a gap in the Overseas Highway connecting Key West with the mainland.

One hot August morning, two striking co-eds, Cindy and Ella, step off a train in Islamorada to be greeted with the crude cat-calls of beery veterans. What happens next is unexpected. Cindy singles out Fred, a soft-spoken, muscular vet drinking a Coke. He offers her a sip. She accepts, flirts, and invites him to her hotel in Key West for an amorous rendezvous.

Dealing love and betrayal in equal measure, the protagonists of Veterans Key embark on a course of events that will keep readers guessing.

Eager to meet Cindy, Fred has no inkling that he has in fact been chosen to participate in a carefully planned bank robbery in Havana, the results of which will have enormous consequences for everyone involved. But this pivotal event is barely an introduction to the riveting mystery that is Veterans Key, a serio-comic novel with moments of pathos, terror, and more twists and turns than a cottonmouth snake.

With fate and family tied together and wrapped tight in a web, Richard Bareford ensnares readers in this original story where nobody is quite who they seem.

Cindy’s brother Emilio is a Cuban revolutionary intent on avenging his torture by deposed General Machado’s secret police. Cindy’s father is a former official of the target bank and his knowledge of the contents of a certain safe deposit box is critical for the heist. Fred’s role is to play the patsy in the robbery and the investigation that will surely follow.

If everything had gone to plan, Fred would take the fall, while Emilio and the girls escape with the money, but in this highly original, picaresque novel, nothing goes to plan.

As the story unfolds, the characters’ various involvements with good guys and thugs, including the Cuban police, American FBI agents, Communists, Nazi spies, and mobsters from the Meyer Lansky gang make for a rich mix of deceptions, lies and misdirection. Ultimately Ella may be the most complex figure of them all, a 17-year-old German Jew living an impossible balancing act.

Bareford creates a vivid and compelling adventure by weaving the historical with the plausible.

The disdain of camp officials for the men in their charge and the devastating aftermath of the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane adds gravitas to the deceptively light tone throughout much of the book.

Veterans Key evokes other distinctive novels including The Horse’s Mouth and A Confederacy of Dunces, not for their story lines but for the originality of their thinking. Readers may appreciate the nods to Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. There is no “predictable” here, only the sheer joy of an original work that commands your attention on its own terms. Highly recommended!

February 7, 2024
IN the LAND of the FEATHERED SERPENT by Richard C. Brusca – Historical Caribbean & Latin Fiction, Magical Realism, Adventure Fiction

Odel Bernini wades deeper and deeper into treacherous political intrigue, in Richard C. Brusca’s Historical Adventure novel, In the Land of the Feathered Serpent.

This story, like the feathered serpent itself, moves time and space to visit an era remembered by many Americans as one where the U.S. government worked to destabilize several Central American regimes who were at odds with its politics.

A young Odel works as chief curator of a world-renowned natural history museum in Seattle, an occasional teacher at a college in nearby Tacoma, and an archaeology hobbyist. His marine biology fieldwork in support of his specialty – the documentation of crustaceans in Central America – brings him time and again to nations long under the political sway of the United States, especially Nicaragua and Guatemala.

Revolutions and counterrevolutions create governments and insurgents that brutalize the local populations, especially the indigenous people. Prodded by his wife, the daughter of an American cultural attaché, Bernini approaches the CIA to ask whether it might fund his continued research in the region in exchange for “some silly things” he could do for them.

Those “silly things” lead to funding from a foundation to cover his travel, but with strings attached.

He collects crustaceans and intel. Having sold his soul, he gradually undertakes more dangerous tasks on the CIA’s behalf. Like a frog placed into room-temperature water, it is almost too late before he realizes that the burner has been lit. In addition to the growing peril to his life, Bernini falls for a devastatingly gorgeous woman he meets in a hotel bar, on the eve of his first assignment.

As things grow more complicated, the malicious Guatemalan army tears through the jungle looking for Bernini. He must contend with the wildlife buzzing and slithering around him in the dark and hopes he can escape – right up until he meets a venomous fer-de-lance snake.

Author Brusca delivers modern man’s Odyssey, both in scale and complexity.

We are riveted to this man’s journey of self-discovery through challenging times as he navigates the siren calls of the CIA and impossibly beautiful and sexually adept women while his mundane life as an academic and museum curator disintegrates. The lead character’s descent into calamitous Central American politics and American foreign policy plays foil to erotic scenes with his wife back home in Seattle, a darkly fascinating and even more beautiful seductress in Central America, and a final twist coupling with a yet more mysterious and enigmatically enthralling woman.

Author Brusca has an effortless style that draws the reader in and manages to convey needed facts of science, political history, and geography that quickly absorb the reader. Brusca delivers a mega-novel that will resonate with readers drawn to sensually charged, clandestine storylines that run through dangerous political landscapes and treacherous jungles. In the end, much like the heroes he echoes, Odel Bernini, is a super-heroic Indiana Jones archetype with a whole bunch of sexy Bond on the side.

October 13, 2021
TREASURE: A Trilogy by Vanessa Hoffman

In the 1930s, a homeless, pregnant teenager dies in a New York shelter after giving birth to twin, golden-haired boys, identical in every respect except for a disfiguring birthmark. One child is adopted into a wealthy family; the other one ends up in an orphanage. Kenneth grows into a handsome, privileged, and self-absorbed man; Francis lives a hardscrabble life, raging against his fate and determined to one day balance the scales.

Years later, Camille, a forty-something woman who has grown up in a loving family but has received more than her share of hard knocks in life, decides to spend the afternoon drinking in a tavern. There she meets a distinguished gentleman in his 60s, who introduces himself as Kenneth. They chat, and something clicks.

Kenneth, a retired general from the military, owns a huge ranch and has made a vast fortune off cattle and citrus groves. For seven months, Camille dates the man of her dreams, believing that her luck has finally changed. Or has it? Is Kenneth who he says he is? For that matter, is Camille the woman Kenneth believes her to be?

Thus begins a trilogy of absorbing stories, interconnected by fascinating characters and united by theme. Long after readers finish the book, they may find themselves reflecting on the questions Vanessa Hoffman asks about how we lead our lives.

Are our important life decisions the product of how we were raised by our parents? Or are they more heavily influenced by the instinct to survive? And once we make unethical choices, do we rationalize them and ignore any feelings of guilt? Ultimately, will we pay for our bad decisions, or will we skate through life, able to ignore the damage done to others?

The people who populate Hoffman’s novel are neither wholly good nor wholly bad; but are merely victims of life’s vagaries. They are ordinary people, innocent, vulnerable victims, the self-absorbed and privileged, Irish Mafia bosses, and criminals in league with Jihadists. They have—in some cases—lucked out by an accident of birth, but in other cases, had to struggle to overcome daunting obstacles. All have made questionable, life-altering choices.

Time and again, Ms. Hoffman draws a picture of a person who, had circumstances been different, might’ve made different decisions. In each case, Ms. Hoffman asks the question; will they suffer the consequences of their actions? Some readers may find Hoffman’s tone occasionally a tad preachy. However, the intriguing characters and the interwoven stories of suspense and political intrigue will remain with readers long after they finish the book. Treasure: A Trilogy raises important questions about the ways in which we live our lives. An engrossing and fascinating novel!

May 18, 2015