Rating: 4.5 stars
CBR17 Bingo: Free (swapping out Migrant)
In a world pretty much like our own, people were just going about their ordinary lives when suddenly, everything changed. Gigantic portals to some other mystical dimension began opening all over the world. It soon became clear that if the portals were left unattended for a while, hordes of horrific monsters emerged and proceeded to wreak havoc. Once specialised teams started breaching the gates, they discovered each portal contained a lot of rare and valuable minerals and resources, as well as the scary monsters, and each gate had an anchor, which, when destroyed, would collapse the gates. Humans started developing specialised talents that allowed them to help explore the gates and fight the emerging threats.
One of the people whose world changed irrevocably with the appearance of the first gates was Adaline "Ada" Moore. She had a supportive husband and two kids, but after the chaos and terror of the first invasion of monsters, her husband decided he had other places to be, and abandoned her and her children entirely. Ada is now employed by the government, and her Talent allows her to survey the various breaches for whatever resources are there, to ascertain what needs to be extracted before the gate collapses. Her talent is rare and sought-after, so she has been in hundreds of breaches over the past decade, always carefully guarded and one of the first people to be evacuated if something goes wrong.
But not this time. Going into a breach, there is an unexpected attack of monsters that the advance team didn't find and neutralise, and the man who is supposed to guard Ada panics, lets off an explosion to hide his tracks and runs away, trapping Ada, the only human survivor, in a labyrinthine cave system with no obvious exit. Her only companion is a scared tracker dog, a German Shepherd named Bear. She is granted an unexpected gift by a dying alien warrior woman, who was fighting the ruthless monsters that attacked the team. The woman basically dies in Ada's arms, but gifts Ada a mystical gemstone which sinks into Ada's forehead before the woman dies. She is told this is her "inheritance", and as she is forced to traverse the creepy and dangerous passages in the dark, Ada discovers that the gemstone has given her increased endurance, the ability to see in the near dark, as well as a wealth of knowledge about alien worlds and civilisations Ada never dreamed existed.
Ada believes herself to be abandoned, assuming everyone outside believes she died in the attack. However, she promised her children she would be home, and refuses to leave them orphaned if she has anything to say about it. Ada has no previous experience with fighting and self-defence, and Bear is only barely an adult dog. Nevertheless, they are forced to fight for their lives and level up quickly to survive. As an unexpected side effect, it turns out that eating alien monster mystery meat as your only source of protein comes with a number of new and exciting mutations that enhance Ada and her trusty dog considerably.
Of writers still alive today, Ilona Andrews are among my absolute favourites. The husband and wife writing team have written some of my favourite paranormal fantasies over the past decade and a half, and I love that some of their most creative works have begun as free episodic fiction on their website, to give their fans something diverting to read when times get tough. The Inheritance, now part one of The Breach Wars was supposed to be a novella length story, published in installments about once a week, but as is so often the case, the authors discover that they need to write more and longer to make the story complete, and we lucky readers therefore ended up with a short novel instead, and the promise of more excitement to come.
One of their strengths when writing is the characterisation, not only of their protagonists (in this case, Ada Moore, forty-something mother-of-two, and developing badass), but also the supporting cast. When people began developing Talents, some got enhanced speed, endurance and fighting abilities and are counted as combat classes. Ada's talent is that of Assessor, very much a non-combat class, but since she is one of the people who help determine what all the various goodies can be found inside the gates, she makes the companies that she is hired out to, and the government she works for, huge amounts of money, and is therefore treasured and protected. She knows the work is dangerous, but it pays extremely well, and the benefits allow her to feed and house her kids well, send them to the best schools (and the death benefits are enough to support them until adulthood, should the worst happen). While she's seen some scary things in the past, she's never been in a situation as bad as the one she finds herself in here, abandoned by people who were supposed to protect her and left for dead.
If she were alone in the world, Ada might have given up and let herself die in the breach, but she knows that her deadbeat husband won't be there for the kids, and she can't stand the thought of them being left orphaned and scared. So she ovaries up and determines to find an alternate way out of the gate, nearly dying more than once, but emerging stronger and fiercer with each near-death experience.
In the decade since the Gates started appearing and threatening the world, large organisations or guilds have been formed with both combat and non-combat Talents, specialising in killing any hostile threats inside, extracting valuable resources and collapsing anchors to neutralise the gates. Elias McFeron works for the guild that employed the team supposed to protect Ada. He's not exactly happy when he discovers the cluster f**k of incompetence that led to most of a team being left for dead inside a Gate they were responsible for, including a very experienced Assessor. The stories of the few survivors who made it out, including the guy who was supposed to sacrifice himself to protect Ada, if it came to that, are a little bit too similar and rehearsed to be believable, and they know something untoward went down. Elias and his team are so far secondary characters, and this part of the story is more of a minor subplot (somewhat fleshed out in the extended scenes added once the book was made ready for publication), but for the reader, it's nice to know that someone trustworthy and honourable out there is working to get Ada out, even if she doesn't know it herself.
I know that the audio version of this hasn't been finalised yet and will hopefully become available at some point in November. This is primarily a digital release, but print-on-demand copies can be purchased as well. While the story was being serialised on their website, the authors commissioned accompanying art, which is all included in the e-book (in colour if you have a colour screen), as well as additional art released only in the full version. So you get some really gorgeous illustrations accompanying the story.
Judging a book by its cover: The cover art and internal illustrations in The Inheritance are all done by Candice Slater, and once again, prove that Ilona Andrews can have decent covers, as long as they are the ones commissioning it. What I especially like about this cover is that it seems to reveal new details every time I look at it. There are so many tiny details.
Crossposted on Cannonball Read.
