A Man Betrayed

4 stars, Metaphorosis reviews

Summary
As fugitive Jack the baker's boy and Melli the heiress each try to find their way to safety, things keep going from bad to worse for them, with betrayal and back luck constantly thwarting their best efforts to control different kinds of power.

Review
A Man Betrayed is very much a continuation of The Baker's Boy. If it weren't for the size (1,500 pages combined), the books would read comfortably as one behemoth story. In fact, that's how I'm doing it now, in Hachette's useful, but frankly not that well put together e-book version – there's a much needed map, but it's only in book III; there's no cover art for the omnibus at all; and the style and layout changes somewhat between books.

The story, though is worth it. It's not exactly surprising, but the twists and turns are more than enough to keep the book interesting. Poor hero Jack is usually anguished, and Jones does perhaps go a little too far in always having some accident destroy his hopes, but he remains interesting. Melli, the heroine, starts to come into her own more in this volume, where before she was sketched in in broader outline. Note that there are things in both books so far that would look odd today if a man wrote them, but Jones is more able to get away with.

Geography continues to be important but a bit vague, and the map hidden (in this edition) in book III is useful. Magic, in some ways the crux of the whole trilogy, is also vague. It has a high price, and Jack doesn't know how it works, but unfortunately neither do we.

I did like the fact that Grift and Bodger, two guards used as comic relief and to convey information throughout the books, are drawn deeper into the story in this book. They're not only authorial mechanisms, though they are that and do it well.

All in all, not quite as thrilling as the first book, adventure-wise, but with more character development and still plenty of action. A fine middle book