Mortal Heart

Starred review from September 29, 2014
This final volume in LaFevers’s much-praised His Fair Assassin trilogy centers on Annith, the most brilliant of the young women brought up in the convent of St. Mortain, an ancient Celtic god still very much present in the tale’s 15th-
century Brittany. Despite being unequalled with knives and bow, Annith has been refused assignment as an assassin by the Abbess even though her close friends, Sybella and Ismae, have already made their first kills. When a much younger and underprepared girl is sent out in her stead, probably to her death, Annith rebels, fleeing the convent. She hopes to aid the endangered Duchess of Brittany whose meager forces must protect their country from a French invasion. On her way, however, Annith meets Balthazaar—a Hellequin, one of the damned souls charged with bringing the recently dead to Mortain, but also “breathtakingly handsome in a dark,
almost broken way”—and her life is changed forever. Both a powerful tale of political intrigue and a heady supernatural romance, this memorable adventure will entirely satisfy devotees of this series. Ages 14–up. Agent: Erin Murphy, Erin Murphy Literary Agency.

November 1, 2014
In the series' (Grave Mercy, rev. 3/12; Dark Triumph, rev. 5/13) third installment, Annith, overskilled and underused daughter of Mortain, god of Death, rebels against her abbess's decree that she remain immured in the convent as Mortain's seeress. Her rebellious escape to the world of politics, murder, and romance revolutionizes Annith's understanding of her nature and identity and brings about her sexual awakening: "My skin recognizes the dark, brooding caress of his gaze, and I shiver," she burbles. Indeed, LaFevers's writing here too often slips to the banal depths of an adolescent's romantic fantasy ("his finely sculpted cheeks"; "[I] allow a bitter smile to play about my lips"), overwhelming the story's engagement with its historical setting: the fictional, partly fantastical, very convoluted politics of Brittany and France in the fifteenth century. Even so, LaFevers effectively ties up the loose ends of the trilogy's cast -- its loves, connivings, and murderous skills -- with more love than war. deirdre f. baker

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