by Alison Goodman
rating: ✰✰✰✰✰
published: 21st January, 2016
spoilers? yes
Goodreads
He gently took her arm, breaking her thrall. She looked up into his face, a blessedly still anchor in the pitch and roll of the room. She noted the small, sympathetic smile that curved his mouth, and the gold flecks in his dark eyes, and he was saying something, but it was all so far away.
The Dark Days Club was at the top of my anticipated releases for this year, and holy shit it did not disappoint. Think of a cross between Jane Austen and X-Files and you have something like this.
Hidden within all levels of society are tens of thousands of creatures called Deceivers. They look like humans, but leech off the energy that people provide, to form these things called 'whips' which are like tails of energy that they use to kill. The most whips a Deceiver can have is three, and this is when they're at their most powerful.
For the most part, the humans and Deceivers live in coexistence. The Dark Days Club is there to police this living. It is made up of normal human beings, and eight Reclaimers, who are humans with enhanced senses, reflexes, and strength, and who fight these Deceivers who step out of line.
Enter Lady Helen, who is the daughter of a traitor to the Crown, and who lives in the custody of her Uncle (by the way, there is a slight trigger warning that goes with this - her Uncle, while not overtly physically abusive with her, is verbally abusive and there is some suggestion of a previous physical aspect to the abuse) and her Aunt. Ten years before, her mother fled the country as a traitor with her father and both drowned in a shipwreck. All Helen has to remember them, is two miniatures - one of her mother and one of her father.
The other main character of the story is Lord Carlston, who is distantly related to Helen's Uncle. There are rumours that he killed his wife, and got into a fight with a Duke, Selburn. At the beginning of the story, he is returned to England following three years on the Continent.
The story starts with Helen preparing for her presentation to the Queen Charlotte. In a last minute decision, she decides to take the miniature of mother with her. While at the presentation, she meets Lord Carlston, who steals the miniature from her, apparently inexplicably. To make things even more interesting, the Queen also tells Helen not to believe everything people say about her mother.
In order to get her miniature back, Helen invites Lord Carlston over to her Uncle's house, much to the displeasure of her Aunt who doesn't wish to be associated with him after the rumours of what happened to his wife. However, instead of just handing back the miniature, Lord Carlston throws it as hard as he can at her head. And Helen catches it.
Anyway, there's a bit of an interlude while Helen processes this development and then Lord Carlston ends up explaining to her about the Reclaimers and the Dark Days Club. This book is essentially setting up Helen's introduction to this hidden world, and the idea that she, being a direct inheritor of her Reclaimer powers from her mother, is a prophesised harbinger of death. There's an interesting bit where it claims that Napoleon himself is a Deceiver.
This book is immediately going on my favourites list, for the uniqueness of the plot, and the characters. Helen is a sympathetic main character, and Lord Carlston has some great character development. Of course, it remains up in the air whether he did in fact kill his wife and what the true story is behind his fight with Selburn (I'm suspicious of Selburn myself. He seemed to want to get close to Helen, and although that may simply be the introduction of a love triangle, Lord Carlston seems to hate him very much, so I think there is more to it), but there were some hints that all is not as it seems.
So, while this book may have been slow to get started, it was never boring. Maybe that's just me and my love of books like this - fantasies set in regency England - but Alison Goodman is a great writer and honestly I wish the second book was out already because I need it.
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