Rating: 3.25* of fiveThe Publisher Says: Mexico-Tenochtitlan, in the year Twelve-House: the vast, teeming city of the Aztecs at the height of its glory. sacrificial victim up the steps of the Great Pyramid to celebrate the Festival of the Raising of Banners. at the ritual slaughter of the so-called Flowery Death. Yaotl's only worry is how to explain it to his master. questions about the sorcerers who have vanished from his impregnable prison, Yaotl realises he needs answers soon. threaten the future of everything he knows.My Review: I felt transported to pre-Conquest Tenochtitlan. The main character is a very complex and involving man, and it's fun to get to know him. The world he inhabits is deeply interesting and drawn in careful, artlessly presented detail. Levack should give lessons in world-building to most historical novelists, since evreything I learned was tied to character development not to mere didacticism.The mystery itself was not as wonderful as the storytelling that got us to the end. It's predictable, and I can't say that I as a queer man appreciated the villain's queerness being presented as a source of his villainy. It's accurate to the times and the culture, of course, and there's nothing that suggests it's gratuitous except that one really didn't need any information about sexual orientation to make the mystery make sense.A flaw, and a serious one at that. It feels like the author could be venting some personal animus in this characterization, though I have no evidence of this and can't support it with anything aside from my own feelings. An entire star taken off my personal rating. But withal, the author's abilities are such that I have all the books in the series lined up on the night-table ready to be read. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
This is something a little bit different. It's a mystery thriller, but set in the Ancient world of the Aztecs. Yaotl is a slave, asked to solve the mysterious disappearence of some sourcerers by the Emperor. Only he soon realises that to do so is to go agaist his Masters wishes. Murder, kidnapping and beatings soon follow.It's a good story, bloodthirsty in places (such as the blow by blow account of the human sacrifices on top of the God's pyramids) and will keep you reading until the end. My only problem was that some of the language was a bit too modern sounding and dragged me out of the ancient atmosphere. But I'm sure you'll enjoy nontheless - I certainly did.Well worth reading just because it's so different from the run of the mill thrillers.
