With straightforward prose, a single first-person point of view and seamless world-building, The Obsidian Tower is a fast-paced and riveting start to Melissa Caruso's Rooks and Ruin series.
All her life, Ryx has lived by the family motto: "Guard the tower, ward the stone." The novel begins as Ryx works to broker peace between two other domains. The first envoy to arrive breaks into the eponymous Tower, and because Ryx's magic works backward, killing anything she touches instead of guiding and shaping life, Ryx accidentally kills them while trying to avoid setting off the powerful obelisk inside. Learning of this, Ryx's grandmother, the Witch Lord of Morgrain, sends Ryx to the nearby Rookery encampment--an international group that deals with magical problems--for aid, and she disappears. Then the other envoy arrives.
"Everything was sliding into the Hell of Nightmares, and I had no idea how to stop it." After upending everything Ryx knows, Caruso slows things down a bit to help Ryx and readers make sense of things before building the pace and tension again with a complex series of twists, betrayals and surprising alliances.
While The Obsidian Tower ends in a satisfying way, readers will be glad to know that Rooks and Ruin is a planned trilogy, because Caruso has left so many threads unwoven that they'll be eager to read what comes next for Ryx and the Rooks. --Suzanne Krohn, editor, Love in Panels