Sometimes, and it doesn’t happen often, you start reading a book and it just works. Everything is exactly the way you like. The story flows, the writing is smooth, the pacing is perfectly unhealthy for your heart rate but this is what we want! Every word, every bit of dialogue, every scene has captured you and before you know it, the book is finished. Deceit was that book for me. I read a page and I just knew I was going to enjoy this. And I did, all the way to the end.

Yeah, this story does not do any favours for the faint of heart. It’s brutal and unforgiving. The main character, it seems, has been in deep shit since youth but you know what? He’s kept his chin up nonetheless and that I can get behind because the characters story, his journey is powerful.

Deceit is structured to follow the main character in two timelines, the present and the past. This structure is imperative for a story as grim and brutal as this. This!… is the perfect example of what I want my main character to do to me – sink his teeth in me so deep that it’s as if I live through every disaster and tragedy right there with him. The character development – the internal conflict and guilt (man, I do love a bit of guilt!) strike me as the perfect tools to make any story interesting. There is the naivete of youth, the ambition for grander things and, surprise-surprise, life is never just that simple of wanting and getting.

But what if the main character had fallen flat? Well, I can tell you, the story is still there. There is larger picture, the overall setting of the world that in itself is intriguing enough and with enough ’snakes in the grass’ to keep the reader intrigued.

Deceit made me recognize that yes, whilst it’s a grim story (and I bloody live for a good, grim read), it’s not conveyed via the endless, one after the other battle and fight scenes. Yes, there is plenty of those in this title, but they do not make the foundation that this story stands upon, if that makes sense. I find descriptions of battles and fight scenes so utterly boring. Like when they go on for more than a page… I do apologize – the placement of feet, the raising of the sword into such and such a position, the circling of the enemy – YES!…it does create and set the scene, but jaysus, it gives me nothing. The crunching bone, the blood spat through grinded teeth, the grasping of the intestines as they fall through the victim’s fingers from their sliced open belly – if this goes on for more than a page: meh! I say. Meh! And I can hear a chorus of groans from hardcore fantasy readers – „But fights and battle are the secret sauce! They’re incredibly hard to create!“ I know. I agree. But Deceit didn’t bore me to tears with such details. Simple as that. What it did incredibly well, for my tastes, was the mental anguish, the torment of regrets, the heaviness that lies upon the soul of that very one character. If the author has managed to put that on paper, in written word? Magnificent!

Who would I recommend this book to? For the fans of the grimmer fantasy. For the readers of Gunmetal Gods by Zamil Akhtar, the readers of Kings of Paradise by Richard Nell – Deceit, right here, is your next book to read!