My Rating ~ Five stars

5-gold-stars

RELEASE DATE: 4 March 2019

Publisher: Allen & Unwin

Format: Paperback

Pages: 432

RRP: AU$19.99

Blurb

A divided nation. Four Queens. A ruthless pickpocket. A noble messenger. And the murders that unite them.

Get in quick, get out quicker.

These are the words Keralie Corrington lives by as the preeminent dipper in the Concord, the central area uniting the four quadrants of Quadara. She steals under the guidance of her mentor Mackiel, who runs a black market selling their bounty to buyers desperate for what they can’t get in their own quarter. For in the nation of Quadara, each quarter is strictly divided from the other. Four queens rule together, one from each region:

Toria: the intellectual quarter that values education and ambition
Ludia: the pleasure quarter that values celebration, passion, and entertainment
Archia: the agricultural quarter that values simplicity and nature
Eonia: the futurist quarter that values technology, stoicism and harmonious community

When Keralie intercepts a comm disk coming from the House of Concord, what seems like a standard job goes horribly wrong. Upon watching the comm disks, Keralie sees all four queens murdered in four brutal ways. Hoping that discovering the intended recipient will reveal the culprit – information that is bound to be valuable bartering material with the palace – Keralie teams up with Varin Bollt, the Eonist messenger she stole from, to complete Varin’s original job and see where it takes them.

Review

Thank you to Allen & Unwin for providing me with a copy of Four Dead Queens, in exchange for an honest review.

Keralie is a thief, one of the best, and when she manages to steal a commcase from a messenger, on instruction from her mentor, she assumes it’s just another job. But the commcase contains chips with someone’s memories on them. When Keralie sees the four ruling queens brutally murdered on those chips, she decides to head to the palace, together with the messenger, to deliver the information. Keralie doesn’t do anything for free and she’s hoping the information on the the chips might entice a reward she desperately needs from the palace. While trying to uncover the mystery of what she has seen, Keralie has to question old and new friendships, and maybe even herself.

This book has just made it up there as one of my favourite fantasy reads! I loved the complex characters, the world and the story. There were hidden motives and secrets galore, making sure I never really knew who to trust. It was one of those books where I was annoyed when I had to put it down half way through, and attend to stupid ‘life duties’ 😏 There were so many twists and I loved the way the book alternated between being told from Keralie’s point of view, then the point of view of each of the queens. It was cleverly written so that you were never quite sure whether the story was unfolding in a linear fashion or if you were reading flashbacks (or flash forwards), until close to the end. The descriptions of Quadara were rich and made it easy for me to become immersed in the world. The mystery had me guessing the whole way through, and although I maybe wasn’t quite sold on the way it turned out, I didn’t even care, the whole story was still a solid 5 stars for me!