Earlier this week I reviewed the book Deryni Rising, the first in Katherine Kurtz’s series after some kind eBay bookseller stuffed six of her books into my package. I’d not known much about her or the series and dived in to be pleasantly surprised by the first book. So how is the sequel?
Book two, and Kurtz has found her footing. Deryni Checkmate runs the same length as Deryni Rising but moves with a confidence the first book was still building toward. This is the trilogy’s Empire Strikes Back: the villains win the round, nothing gets resolved, and the good guys close the book scrambling for a plan heading into book three.
The perspective narrows mostly onto Alaric Morgan, with a few detours elsewhere, and the story puts him through two crises that build on each other. The Church moves to excommunicate him and threatens to deny sacraments across his entire region over his Deryni heritage, dragging the clergy into open conflict over what to do with him. At the same time, a war is building on the border, propped up by a mysterious enemy commander whose public image is fiercely anti-Deryni, with an undercurrent suggesting he might be Deryni himself. The irony isn’t wasted, and it gives the war plot a sharper edge than a straightforward border conflict would.
The Church material is the standout. The council scene arguing over the excommunication and the schism it triggers plays like real medieval ecclesiastical politics, factions, canon law, and doctrine all in the room together, good men and bad men on both sides of the argument. It’s the most convincing version of Kurtz’s church-as-real-institution approach yet, and it makes the stakes feel like more than a fantasy plot device.
A side plot lands harder than expected: a man falls for a woman, goes to a witch for help winning her, and the spell kills her instead. It’s a small tragedy tucked into a much bigger war, and it stings. Kurtz kills a fair number of characters across this book, but none of it reads as gratuitous the way body counts often do in modern fantasy. Every death moves the plot. The tensest of them comes on a ship, when an assassin goes after Morgan and his squire takes the hit meant for him. That death actually surprised me. I didn’t see it coming for that character, and it lands as a real cost rather than a shock beat.
None of the exposition-drop problems from the first book show up here. The groundwork is already laid, so Kurtz spends this entire volume on story instead of setup, and the pacing benefits for it. The twists land with proper timing instead of piling up back to back the way some of book one’s did.
This isn’t a place to start the series. It leans on the reader already knowing these characters, and that familiarity is exactly what lets it move as fast as it does. But as a direct continuation, it’s a clear step up from the first book across pacing, prose, and character work. Read it back to back with book three. By the last chapter here, putting it down isn’t really an option.
9/10
Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.
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Loved these books back in the day; and the Camber of Culdi books too.