Blog Tour Review - Masters of Death by Olivie Blake

 

Blog Tour Review - Masters of Death by Olivie Blake

This book is about an estate agent. Only she's a vampire, the house on sale is haunted, and its ghost was murdered.

When Viola Marek hires Fox D'Mora to deal with her ghost-infested mansion, she expects a competent medium. But unbeknownst to Viola, Fox is a fraud - despite being the godson of Death.

As the mystery unfolds, Viola and Fox are drawn into a quest that neither wants nor expects. And they'll need the help of a demonic personal trainer, a sharp-voiced angel and a love-stricken reaper. And it transpires that the difference between a mysterious lost love and a dead body isn't nearly as distinct as you'd hope.

Masters of Death is a stunning and complex novel. 

It's like an intricate puzzle box. 

We can see several characters, each of them presented fairly openly and honestly. These are the pieces of our puzzle. Then it's as if they move around a central mechanism, like a clockwork work of art. 

Images are shown that make very little sense when we first see them but our pieces keep moving, rotating at different speeds and in different directions and slowly, slowly, we see those images again but they're revealed to us in a different way, the positions of the players are different, we've seen more of the mechanisms perhaps or we just have a new understanding about how each piece fits together and those random, confusing scenes we saw the first time we moved through them now make more sense. Not perfect sense, because our perception is always at least slightly flawed, but enough to understand what is unfolding, and what has already unfolded, and those pieces keep moving in their little dance, more scenes that were previously hidden come into play and they help us understand the ones we've already seen, and they help us understand more about the players, the pieces, the characters. We begin to see them in a different light as they twist and turn, showing new sides of themselves and as their relationships to each other shift and change.

But the heart of this mechanism is still unknowable, the game at the heart of the puzzle box is something we know about from the way everyone moves around it, but we don't see it, we don't understand it, we can't possibly know it, until, towards the end of our drama more things move into new positions, mechanisms unfold, unseen panels can now be seen and everything clicks into place to show us the heart of the puzzle, the central mystery, and with it the prize, a collection of truths. Truths about what it means to be alive and what it's like to live forever, truths about desire and secrets, and, beneath all of these, truths about love. It's extraordinary and it is beautiful.

And that was what it was like reading Masters of Death. 

🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕

Masters of Death by Olivie Blake is out now from Tor. 

I was given a review copy in exchange for his honest review and participation in this Black Crow PR blog tour.