This book came my way by an eBay seller who sent me a whole stack of her books in addition to my order of Anne McCaffrey collectibles, and so I was interested in reading. Katherine Kurtz, it turns out, was McCaffrey’s neighbor for a long time in Ireland, and while I generally don’t read a lot of straight fantasy, this one had a lot of heart and interesting points where I will be continuing with the series.
The plotline goes with King Brion Haldane dies in the opening pages, poisoned by magic, and the fallout drives every page after. His son Kelson is fourteen and unready for the throne. Alaric Morgan, Brion’s closest advisor and a Deryni, one of the psionically gifted minority most of the kingdom fears and distrusts, takes the blame almost immediately. From there the accusations stack. Nobles who’d tolerated Morgan while Brion lived turn on him the moment the king is gone, and even Kelson’s own mother disavows her son over his continued loyalty to his father’s advisor. The whole court seems to be hunting Morgan at once, and the plotting escalates until the widowed sorceress Charissa moves to seize the crown before Kelson can be anointed.
The book ends in two duels back to back: Morgan against Charissa’s sword-champion, then Kelson against Charissa herself in direct magical combat. Both land. The buildup earns them.
What sets Kurtz apart from most fantasy magic systems is that Deryni power reads more like psionics than spellcraft: mental reach, forced compulsion, shielding, the kind of power that works on a person’s mind rather than the weather. It gives the magic a different texture than the usual fireball-and-incantation fantasy toolkit, and it’s the freshest element in the book.
The setting does even more work than the magic. Kurtz builds a church that functions like an actual church: liturgy, Latin, real theological stakes, priests who range from corrupt to genuinely holy rather than defaulting to one or the other. Father Duncan McLain, priest and Morgan’s cousin, is the clearest example, a man of real faith who’s also caught in the same political web as everyone else. Saint Camber gets invoked constantly, a martyred Deryni whose canonization the church itself is still fighting about. The parallels to Catholicism aren’t glancing. They’re structural. How much of actual Christian history exists in this world, and how Latin liturgy fits into a setting that isn’t Earth, never gets explained here. It doesn’t need to be. The backdrop works on its own terms, and the unanswered question is more interesting left open for now.
The pacing is the book’s other strength. Kurtz keeps the scope tight: one kingdom, one succession crisis, one core cast, and every chapter ends on a hook that pulls straight into the next. It’s a fast read and a hard one to put down, which is a smart way to open a series this long. Readers get anchored in the characters and the stakes before the world expands.
The seams show on a second look, though. The plot leans hard on characters turning against Morgan in quick succession, and after the third or fourth reversal the pattern becomes visible. Kelson’s mother disowning her own son under pressure is the sharpest example: the moment works in isolation, but it asks a reader to accept a mother abandoning her child on fairly thin evidence, and it reads more like the plot needed her out of Morgan’s corner than like earned character work. There’s also a stretch of history and persecution exposition early on to get the world established. Forgivable in a series opener. Still noticeable.
None of that outweighs what the book gets right. The characters carry it, the setting carries it, and an ending built on back-to-back duels is exactly the payoff a book like this needs. Strong opener, worth the rest of the trilogy. The series begins with this book here.
8/10
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.
It has been a LOT of years since I read this series but I found the core three books to be excellent. The prequel trilogy about the life and death of St Camber I remember to be solid as well. As the series expanded more into the life of Kelson, I lost interest.
Few authors treat the Church with honesty and respect as Kurtz has. Humans struggling with the political and religious influences behind the scenes. At the center of the saga are a handful of good men who are trying their best to navigate the troubled waters while remaining true to their faith.
I remember enjoying the first book shortly after it came out, especially how it treated its version of Catholicism with a modicum of respect - I never was nor am Roman Catholic, but seeing any new fantasy that showed Christianity both present and woven into the fictional culture was a novel thing (and still pretty rare in modern fantasy). By the third or fourth book, it looked like everyone important (certainly anyone with supernatural ability, including those claiming divine inspiration) was of Deryni ancestry (which was supposedly rare and persecuted), at which point I put it down and never returned. I'm too much of a fan of normal humans, I'm afraid.