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Narrated by Kate Reading.
Ned, age 15, is in France, Aix en Provence, for the summer while his father, a famous photographer, is taking pictures for a new book. He wanders sround the cathedral one day and meets Kate, an American in Aix on a school exchange. They discover a strange and threatening man emerging from the vault, and from then on Ned is led deeper and deeper into a mystery which began over two and a half thousand years ago. At its core is the intense rivalry between two men, a Roman and a Celt, for the love of a woman, Ysabel. Their story is doomed to repeat through the centuries, one killing the other to claim the woman (always a woman plucked from the current time by magic) but this time it's different. Ned and his whole family become embroiled. The plot is gripping, the dilemmas suitably perplexing, and the ending very satisfying. Poor Ned goes through the mill when he starts to dscover that he has some kind of second sight. There's a family rift between his mother and her sister which comes into play. Though the prose is lush and elegant there are moments when this slowed down a little too much. It could have been shorter and more succinct. There was a lot of running arround to no effect, which broke the rising tension. I still enjoyed it, but could have enjoyed it more had it been more compact.
Ten years ago, the criminal gang known as the Cannibal Club split up after a job-gone-wrong. Now Cayce, son of their former leader, Strange, wants to get the band back together to break his dad out of a top security facility in the Kuiper Belt. After ten years, for various reasons, some of them aren't quite up to the job any more, but Cayce is persuasive. To finance the rescue they undertake a series of jobs, each more perilous than the last. Each character takes it in tourn to take the viewpoint, and finally they get to the Kuiper Belt facility to discover that it's not quite as simple as Cayce made out. This was action packed, quirky and fun, and I enjoyed the different viewpoints, though in the end it left me not knowing which character to focus on. There was, however, a good twist at the end.
Bandit, Roz, spots what looks like an easy mark, a soft young man with a treasure map, in a country inn. He easily attaches himself with the intent to wait until the young man has found the treasure and then rob him. Unfortunately for Roz, the soft young man is Penric, who is neither as young nor as soft as he looks, and is posessed of a very clever demon, Desdemona. Pen is one step ahead of Roz all the time, well, maybe until a whole outlaw band turns up, anyway. Penric's treasure is not at all what Roz expects it to be - though those of us who have read earlier Penric stories, could have guessed what it was likely to be - and Penric is less concerned with being robbed than with giving the young bandit a chance for redemption. Another satisfying entry in the saga of Penric and Desdemona.
A short introduction to the world of Jodi Taylor's historians who investigate historical events in contemporary time. (Don't call it Time Travel.)