Prime, 2012, 310 p.

This starts promisingly enough in the prologue when the ancient library of Alexandria lifts off into the sky like a rocket with parts of it still burning. What follows after though is a bit of a disappointment by comparison as its settles down into a tale of fantasy and magic which arguably does not need that preamble at all. When we start chapter one the library has for a long while been in Worldsoul, a place in connection with Earth but also on the border of the Liminality – woven by the Skein out of the legends of the ancestors of man – and a kind of limbo known as the nevergone.

A power vacuum has been created by the sudden unexplained disappearance of the Skein, who used to run Worldsoul, and now various entities are trying to muscle in. It falls to librarian Mercy Fane and an alchemist called Shadow to resist.

Since the origins of the Liminality are not revealed till near the end the mythologies the book draws on appear a bit of a mish-mash with djinns and ifrits, not to mention a Shah, mixed in with demons and Norse gods, Loki in particular. Another off note is the short chapters, which do become more appropriate towards the end when the action hots up but at the start prevent the reader getting to know the characters well enough before being flung off into another viewpoint. Then, too, the action sequences are curiously perfunctory and there is too much info dumping, with a lot of telling rather than showing. The ending screams “sequel coming.” I might give that a long time before ever reading it.

Still, fantasies like this are not really my thing and I have found Williams’s work more palatable in the past.

Pedant’s corner:- Plus points for Abbots General as the plural of Abbot General. Otherwise; the Has’ (the Has’s,) descendent (descendant, which was used later but then reverted to descendent,) Sulis’ (Sulis’s,) “is in the cards” (I’ve always known this as on the cards,) “she would say only that it had been a ploy” (she would say that it had only been a ploy,) dreadnaught (dreadnought, which appeared later,) “the bisecting road ran in either direction” (yes, roads do that; but shouldn’t it be each direction?) stood (standing,) “the no-colour of clear glass” (‘clear glass’ does not mean what this implies; clear itself means transparent. It does not mean colourless.) “But she could not more have resisted it than it any more than she could have flown” (has one ‘more’ too many.) That mean a deeper investigation” (meant,) fit (fitted,) “had made a homunculus of her” (a humuncula, then? Maybe not,) humunculus’ (humunculus’s.) “When it was sure it had got its full attention” (her full attention makes more sense,) “‘I wanted to see what you’d so’” (what you’d do,) “‘Something’s happening?’” (It wasn’t a question,) auroch’s (as far as I’m aware the singular of aurochs is aurochs, so aurochs’s) “all was not as predicted” (that not all was as predicted.)