Druids Sword

Starred Review. The meaty, suspenseful final book of Douglass' Troy Game series (after 2005's Darkwitch Rising) will both horrify and delight readers enthralled by his combative, perpetually reincarnated characters. Four centuries after his plans to complete the Troy Game collapsed when he was betrayed (again) by his ex-wife, Brutus, a supernaturally powerful Kingman who was once an exiled Trojan prince, returns to WWII-era London, reincarnated as the American Maj. Jack Skelton, summoned by the Lord of the Faerie and the need of the land. With the Nazis spreading across Europe, Britain on the brink war and London wracked by a string of brutal murders, Jack joins the rest of the immortals tied to the Troy Game in their last, desperate attempt to eradicate the Game without destroying themselves. Douglass wraps her millennia-spanning epic with a dark, pitch-perfect finale.
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The conclusion of The Troy Game (_Hades' Daughter,_ 2003; Gods' Concubine, 2004; and Darkwitch Rising, 2005, precede it) reunites all the players in London as World War II breaks out. Most are content to live as faerie folk among humans. They no longer hate one another--quite so passionately, anyway--and would like to end the game. But the game came to life with Catling, who, possessed of considerable powers, has a vicious hold on all players. She cursed Grace, daughter of Noah (whose original incarnation was Cornelia, British wife of Brutus) and Weyland Orr (whose original incarnation was Asterion) so that whatever is done to the game is done to Grace. It can't be destroyed without destroying her. Moreover, an indigenous force that only Jack Skelton (original incarnation, Brutus) can sense also opposes the game. The struggles of characters and game are well woven into events in London from September 1939 through May 1941. Moderating the sex that marred its predecessors, Douglass brings the saga to a smashing finish. Frieda Murray
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