Rubric:

Yelena has a choice — be executed for murder, or become food taster to the Commander of Ixia. She leaps at the chance for survival, but her relief may be short-lived.

Life in the palace is full of hazards and secrets. Wily and smart, Yelena must learn to identify poisons before they kill her, recognise whom she can trust and how to spy on those she can't. And who is the mysterious Southern sorceress who can reach into her head?

When Yelena realises that she has extraordinary magical powers of her own, she faces a whole new problem, for using magic in Ixia is punishable by death...

SkyRider's comments:

This one was a bit of a surprise. Sony provided the first chapter on their e-reader as a promotion and I read it expecting it to be a little tacky. I enjoyed it so much that I went out and bought all three books of the trilogy (as proper books, so it might not have been such a good promotion for the e-reader!).

On one level, it resembles so many similar serials; orphan discovers she/he has special powers, is mentored my some powerful and strangely mysterious and attractive figure and goes off on a quest driven by the family they never knew. In that sense, the trilogy covers well trodden ground. What raises these books above the crowd is the quality of the writing. It draws you in and involves you and while Yelena and Valek seem a little too perfect to be true at times, generally speaking the characters are well fleshed out rather than simply black and white.

Maybe it's not great literature, but it was an enjoyable fortnight ploughing through these books.

I'll be releasing them together; I hope they stay together in their journey ahead.

Part of a trilogy released together