#Review - The Foxglove King by Hannah Whitten

The Foxglove King (The Nightshade Crown, Book One)
Hannah Whitten  
Orbit, 9 March 2023
Available as: HB, 466pp, audio, e
Source: Advance copy and audio subscription
ISBN(HB): 9780356521237

I'm grateful to Orbit for an advance copy of The Foxglove King to consider for review.

In the city of Dellaire, the lower orders groan to support King, clergy and nobles who will have the best of everything for themselves.

In the city of Dellaire, bored, decadent aristocrats dose themselves with deadly poisons obtained form illicit death-dealers.

In the city of Dellaire, in vaults deep below the Citadel, a death cult guards the body of a cursed goddess.

And war is coming.

I loved the world building and sheer gothicness of Whitten's new novel, from the seedy docksides to the gilded chambers of the Citadel, all shot through with the odour of death. Woven into the narrative is a divine tragedy - it's certainly not a divine comedy - tracing the city's history and that of its religion in extracts from sacred texts. They describe a war between the gods, whose effects remain very real and very important centuries later. In practical terms, that war left the world contaminated with a substance called 'mortem", the very essence of death, which has to be managed and channelled by a special order of monks, the Presque Mort. 

Others are forbidden to meddle with it, although few have the talent in any case. One who does though is Lore, a young woman who is part spy, part poison trafficker and generally a rogue through and through. Towards the end of this book, in a crisis, Lore takes a momentous decision for reasons which are, she freely admits, completely selfish. That's basically Lore in a nutshell: you're not going to guilt her into doing the right thing for the greater good - she needs to be bribed, blackmailed or coerced, the latter being the method chosen early in the book by those who wish to use her.

Given that background and that character, I must admit that I was a little disappointed by what followed. Lore - basically a sewer rat from the bad part of town who's been working as a spy for one gang of traffickers, embedded (um, literally) with another - is introduced into the wealthy setting of the Citadel with orders to spy on a nobleman. What follows is a series of social and religious engagements, with plenty of conversation between Lore and a slew of nobles, but actually little in the way of action, apart from a couple of set piece events, for most of the middle part of the book. It's established early on that Lore is an experienced and accomplished spy. Also that she has dark abilities (in one memorable scene she raises a dead horse). Yet so much of the story is confined to mildly probing questions of those around her. Even when Lore makes some allies and her investigation switches up a gear, a great deal of time is spent in the library rather than in snooping or other more spy-y activity. Yes'm we get Lore's rather frustrated inner monologue, and there is a love triangle going on,  but I felt there was little in this section to advance the plot.

I must add that the book does lift in its final third, when a number of plot threads come together. There is action. There is hair-raising peril. There is dark magic. Also, multiple levels of betrayal, the revelation of hidden hands and one particular reveal about Lore herself and her role in things that I really hadn't seen coming. 

But still, I felt that this book could have been more. And that's not because of the difference between The Foxglove King and Whitten's previous novels - For the Wolf and For the Throne. I get that they are meant to be different - while those books are darkly romantic, tainted fairytales, and yes, I love that kind of thing, I also enjoy more conventional fantasy which The Foxglove King is albeit with a nice gothic edge. They're not meant to occupy the same genre space, and that's fine.

Still, if you enjoy a competent, cool heroine and a setting that has something of the night about it, this may well be just what you need to read.

For more information about The Foxglove King, see the publisher's website here.