Review – The Mortal Word

From Goodreads: A corrupt countess A spy in danger And an assassin at large

The fifth title in Genevieve Cogman’s witty and wonderful Invisible Library series, The Mortal Word is a rollicking literary adventure.

Peace talks are always tricky, especially when a key diplomat gets stabbed. This rudely interrupts a top-secret summit between the warring dragons and Fae. As a neutral party, Librarian-spy Irene is summoned to investigate. She must head to a version of 1890s Paris, with her assistant Kai and her detective friend Vale, where these talks are fracturing. Here, she must get to the bottom of the attack – before either the peace negotiations or the city go up in flames.

Suspicions fly thick and fast and Irene soon finds herself in the seedy depths of the Parisian underworld. She’s on the trail of a notoriously warlike Fae, the Blood Countess. However, the evidence against the Countess is circumstantial. Could the killer be a member of the Library itself?

It had been quiet a while since I had stepped into the world of the Library, but it is easy to slip straight into the adventure and be swept along with Irene, Kai and Vale. These books are reliably entertaining and this instalment is no different.

This is the start of a new arc and it is a fun and entertaining murder mystery that explores the interactions between the Fae, Dragons and the Library. We get to explore a lot more about the Dragon’s society. May only complaint is we still don’t have a lot of information about our main characters. We are being drip fed little bits of information about them over the past books, exploring Irene and Kai’s relationship at an incredibly slow pace. I would just like to move a little quicker and learn a little more.

I also wish that the main trio were not separated as much throughout the plot. I love Vale but I felt even though this was a murder mystery, he was somewhat absent from a good part of the investigation. The same was true of Kai. We lost a lot of the witty banter that moves between the three, focusing more on Irene. However, I am really like the more political direction this new arc is going and I am looking forward to reading the next in the series.