Book Reviews

Book Blurb

Chaos rules an empty throne.

The Queen remains steadfastly in a coma. James is adjusting to his life as prince regent, helped by new eye-candy Samuel, while Andrew faces up to the reality of working for the opposition—James’ twin sister Alexandra. Andrew and James now find themselves on opposite sides of the war of succession. 

With Alexandra’s bombshell article due to shock the monarchy to its core, she must seek out political allies to take the throne while keeping her restless husband Faisal in check. But the establishment is fighting back, and they’ll use even the most diabolical means to ensure James will produce an heir.

The powerful forces behind Operation Rex face a greater threat—Lizzie’s plans to expose the monarchy’s deadliest secrets to the world. Her pact with the IRA may finally avenge her parents’ murder… and truly enthrone a reign of chaos during this interregnum.

Book Review

At last, I had the chance to read the third installment of this page-turner series I dubbed “‘House of Cards’ with the extra-flavour of royals and celebs” in my review of book number two. Once again, the blurb retraces the major lines of the new developments without actually giving away too much. To say more would lead to spoilers, so I’ll refrain from retelling the countless twists and turns the author invents with the sole goal of making his readers get hooked (he does a perfect job, by the way). Once I picked up this book, I simply couldn’t put it down, which was already the case with the first two books.

 

What can I say then? Simply that it was an unmitigated pleasure to reconnect with the main characters: prince (now prince regent) James, his ex-lover Andrew, his ruthless and cold-blooded sister-cum-opponent Alexandra, the latter’s unfathomable hunk of a husband Faisal, the royal cousin Lizzie with her own hidden agenda, James’s future spouse Princess Katyn of Sweden, not to forget Sam, editor-in-chief of the tabloid The Gazette, and his closeted gay son, who has fallen in love with Andrew. Exits the severe Queen, Victoria II, as she is now in a coma and not likely to survive book number four (altough with this author, I really cannot say I’m sure about that), and while I rushed through the chapters, exit some other characters (I shall not say which ones). And enters Lisa Mantis, the new director general of MI5, one of the British secret services. The author takes up all the threads of his plot, relentlessly makes them plunge on, and even succeeds in entangling them some more until the grand finale and yet another cliff-hanger that, once again, made me gag for the next instalment.

 

I already mentioned it before and am happy to repeat myself: Harry F. Rey sure knows how to write and how to draw me along with the almost perverse twists of his fertile imagination. I could sense the genuine pleasure he must have taken writing these books, because it shines through his finely chiselled scenes, the pitch-perfect dialogs, and all the unexpected turns and reversals. The only thing I could be sure of: when a character got her or his hopes up too high, they would be thwarted expertly and brutally. As a reader, I got a somewhat better overview of what was going on on-scene and off-scene, which allowed me to be one step ahead of the different protagonists (a reader’s smug feelings are sorely underrated when it comes to one’s reading pleasure), but it was subtly done. How does this impact the characters? Well, they always seem just as clueless as in the first two books while they continue to believe they are the masters of their fates. Nope, they are not, that much I can disclose, and they find out the hard way. Therefore it is scandal after scandal after scandal – almost as if one is reading a very juicy tabloid, but much, much better written. At the same time, this almost cruel treatment of the characters made me sympathize with them and therefore find them endearing – something I wouldn’t have felt otherwise because none of them is outright nice or loveable per se. This is an exceedingly clever writing technique if I ever saw one.

 

Anyway, this book as well as the first two are a splendid kind of entertainment, and I am really looking forward to finding out a) how the different plot threads continue and b) how they all come to an end – hopefully several supplementary novels further down the road, that is.

 

 

 

 

 

DISCLAIMER: Books reviewed on this site were usually provided at no cost by the publisher or author. This book has been provided by the publisher for the purpose of a review.

 

Additional Information

Format	ebook and print
Length	Novel, 187 pages
Heat Level
Publication Date	03-October-2019
Price	$4.99 ebook, $12.99 paperback
Buy Link	https://www.amazon.com/Line-Succession-3-Interregnum-ebook/dp/B07YBHJZFQ