T L Huchu
Tor (Pan Macmillan), 7 November 2024
Available as: HB, 400pp, audio, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781529097771
I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me a copy of The Legacy of Arniston House to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.
I've been really enjoying Huchu's Edinburgh Nights series, of which The Legacy of Arniston House is book 4. The setting is a chastened Scotland, humbled in the aftermath of a "Catastrophe" and held down by a resurgent England. Its capital has complex politics, criminal networks, magic and, above all, the authentic texture of an alternate Edinburgh.
Huchu's main character, Ropa Moyo, is engaging and spiky, a marginalised figure (literally - she and her gran live squatters' lives in a caravan encampment on the edge of the city) who is trying to make her way in the world of Scottish magic whose leading lights, snooty and entitled as they are, don't want to be bothering with her. At the end of the previous book, The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle, Ropa seemed to have caught a break when she was hired by the English Sorcerer Royal. While I was concerned this might take her away from Edinburgh, I need not have worried: it seems that Lord Samarasinghe has ongoing business in the North. (That can't bode well, can it...?) Ropa is therefore still hanging round her old home town, albeit cut off from magical society, something that pains her more than she expected. She's even able to revive her old gig as a ghost talker, albeit not everything seems to be well in the spirit realms... there could be trouble ahead.
Huchu definitely ramps up the tension in this book. After a deceptively calm opening (if you've read the first few chapters you may say to yourself "David's talking nonsense again" because they don't seem that calm, but JUST YOU WAIT, IT'S ALL RELATIVE) mayhem of all sorts erupts with rioting, mischief and Ropa being hunted by both magicians and Police. She's framed for a heinous crime and the whole world she was used tseems about to be torn apart. All this leads up to a fast-moving conclusion in which we learn more both about Ropa's past and about recent Scottish history - and are then left, literally, on a cliffhanger.
Or perhaps, over one.
Compared with the first three books, which were more self-contained, The Legacy of Arniston House represents a clear change of gear and of focus. There is, as in each of the others, a self-contained mystery and an injustice to be solved and righted (you might think, actually, several). But there is also a much more intricate and visible connection to the plot that's been glimpsable in the background, with certain puzzles finally closed from those earlier stories. At the same time, the implications of Ropa's own history and background are made plain for the first time.
A fun return to what is shaping up to be one of the most interesting and readable series of the past few years. I'll wait for the next book with a great deal of anticipation.
For more information about The Legacy of Arniston House, see the publisher's website here.
You can buy The Legacy of Arniston House from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith or Waterstones.
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