3.5 Stars

Closer to the Chest continues Lackey’s Herald Spy series, and it left me with mixed feelings. On the positive side, I enjoyed spending more time with Mags and Amily, and seeing Amily take an increasingly active role as a Herald. And Lackey is a pretty good storyteller, balancing action with details that immerse you into the world and the characters’ experiences.

But the negatives almost outweighed the positives for me. For one thing, the book delivers a timely but heavy-handed message about patriarchy, mysogyny, the misuse of religion, and the role of women. I agree with her in large part, though I lack her cynicism about religion, but it’s not necessary to practically bludgeon your reader with your point.

The other thing that really bothered me is the story’s internal logic is questionable. An inordinate number of people are let into the secret that Mags is both a Herald and a spy… this despite several explicit reiterations of the adage “two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead.” If just one of them chose to betray him, or were captured and tortured, Mags’s undercover identity would be compromised and his life could be in danger, yet he doesn’t hesitate to trust quite a few people with the knowledge.

Finally, the book, or rather this trilogy, introduces a major series inconsistency. Rolan, the Companion to the Monarch’s Own, can mindspeak to Amily, who doesn’t have human-to-human mindspeech. Her Gift (animal mindspeech) isn’t as strong as Talia’s empathic Gift in the Arrows of the Queen trilogy. Yet somehow Rolan can mindspeak to Amily when he is bonded to her, but not to Talia when, centuries later, he Talia’s Companion? That’s the sort of inconsistency that drives me nuts as a reader. I realize it’s hard to keep things consistent in a series written over several decades, but Talia’s inability to hear Rolan’s thoughts is pretty significant in the Talia series (which was written first), so it’s irritating to see that Lackey breaks with her own canon here.

I haven’t given up on Lackey, and I enjoyed this third book in the trilogy almost as much as I did the second book (and more than the first one.) But I do miss the earlier Lackey, whose books had a bit more meat and depth and (I suspect) better editing than I’ve seen in the last 10 years or so.

Magic, murder, mystery, mayhem-this book has it all. For library collections with a strong demand for high fantasy, sci-fi/fantasy, and for fans of Ann McCaffrey, Lackey herself, and others like her.