A flawed book, and a weaker entry in the Pathfinder Tales series. Willrich's writing has its strengths, but they are often stymied by weak prose, a predictable narrative and the slightly silly milieu.

Gideon Gull is attending bard school, but it's also secretly a spy school, training up bards for intelligence work. When a magical fog starts driving peopl crazy, Gull reunites with his old flame and some fellow bards to solve the mystery.

The first thing that leapt out at me with this book was the prose, but unfortunately not in a positive way. In an effort to lend the book a suitably bardic tone, Willrich writes with a flowery overstated style, heavy on metaphors that break the flow and possess questionable efficacy. He also seems to struggle incorporating dialogue with action; the book veers wildly between the two at times, and the dialogue was quite... odd in parts. At points, it flows very naturally, but at others it seemed stilted and forced. It felt almost performative - what someone *thinks* they would say, rather than what they would actually say.

It doesn't help that the book has somewhat of a stop-start plot, very episodic and also quite predictable. The druid sections work best but are featured only a little. The villain is immediately guessable and the conclusion foregone.

It's a shame as there are parts of the book that work, but they are sporadic and it's just too inconsistent. I don't know how much of this is down to the setting (the Harry Potter like bard/spy school really is a bit much, as is the vast and powerful array of spells that *students* have), but Willrich seems like a writer who needs to write a few more books to get up to scratch. ( )