City of Storms (Nightmarked, #1) ♦ Kat Ross | Review

A tarot reader who is hiding a sinister secret.  A priest whose damaged heart prevents him from falling asleep. A fallen angel determined to destroy them both.
City of Storms by Kat Ross captured me whole.

When I first started reading City of Storms, I had some hiccups with the story. Because there was a lot of information presented initially that was confusing. But after reading a few pages, and with the aid of the glossary, a mystical world brimming with magic became clear to me.

Paradise Lost meets The Da Vinci Code in this page-turning new fantasy series!
A tarot reader with a dangerous secret. A priest whose scarred conscience won’t let him sleep. And a fallen angel bent on corrupting them both.
After decades of civil war, the Via Sancta has declared victory over humanity’s basest instincts. Anger, hatred and greed are suppressed by intricate Marks on the skin. Wards tame the wild psychic magic of the ley. The Church’s enemies, the once mighty nihilim, have been driven into the Void.
But even the most perfect of worlds has a shadow side.
Alexei Bryce is a priest in the storm-wracked southern capital of Novostopol. He hunts deviants whose Marks have inverted, driving them mad. When a prominent doctor violently turns, Alexei stumbles across a conspiracy at the highest levels of the Via Sancta. The trail leads to Kasia Novak, a tarot reader who is much more than she seems. The cards say their fates are intertwined—if the threads aren’t snapped short.
Now the ley is rising again. A nihilim has infiltrated the city. And Alexei discovers that his faith’s victory over the darkest recesses of the human soul is more fragile than he imagined.
What is your deepest desire? Money? Power? Revenge? Lust? I’ll give to you.
Malach is many things. Seducer of the pious. Survivor of the Via Sancta’s bloody campaigns. Implacable foe of all it stands for. He’s primal desire made flesh, and the thing he wants most is a child. Half-bloods are fragile creatures, but if this one survives, it will be monster, a savior — or both.

City of Storms ♦ Kat Ross

Opinion

The setting is incredibly immersive and dark, and the characters are quite well-developed and very interesting. Kat Ross does a brilliant job of capturing the reader in a world that is both very different from our own and appears to be so very similar to it. Furthermore, her perspective on magic and how everything is interconnected is magnificent.

City of Storms is the first installment of a quadrology called Nightmarked. The story comes around with a lot of unexpected twists, which drew me deeper and deeper into the plot. I was very intrigued by the whole of it. The world building and the three main characters excited me, that I could hardly put my Kindle down.

Fra Alexei Bryce reacts to the Markhounds ^{(special bred dogs)} alarm about someone turning insane and Kasia Novak, a cardomancer ^{(tarot reader)}, who ran for her life because of the mad one. That’s how Ross threw me into the action as the novel begins. Although the rapid-fire introduction of new vocabulary and terms initially makes reading difficult due to the absence of prior context, it was a strong and enthralling beginning. Given that the world building seems to draw extensively from both Latin and the Catholic Church, some knowledge with both would come handy. But as I stated already, the glossary helps a lot as well.

The pace of the story was perfect. I never felt like I had to rush through the pages to keep up. Also, there weren’t any boring sections that contained too many explanations or described unimportant dialogues and actions.
City of Storms is really well written, and I didn’t even lose touch with the characters. They did take a little time before I took a liking to them, including the antihero.

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Conclusion

I really did enjoy reading City of Storms, and I am really excited to dive right into the next installment. I can’t really say why I am excited, because I am not willing to leave any spoilers. But I can recommend this book for readers who enjoy Dark Fantasy paired with Mystery, Magic and Paranormal.

I received an advance review copy for free at BookSirens, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Nightmarked – The Quadrology

About Kat Ross

Kat Ross always loved to read more than anything in the world, especially so-called genre stories — mysteries, fantasy, sci-fi, thrillers, horror. She likes books that take you by the hand and lead you out of the mundane. That ease back the curtain and show you the wondrous and dark and unexpected lurking just around the next corner. She worked in journalism for a long time before returning to writing fiction. Guess which is more fun for her?

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