(Review by Jane Beaumont, Cape Town, South Africa)

Usually I avoid multi-authored books but here we have two top authors collaborating and the results are stylistically seamless.

Some very nice concepts here with elves as baddies, humans enslaved and illicit halfbreeds as heroes, aided at least in part by dragons and hindered by a species of unpleasant unicorn - all of fantasy's favourite fodder but presented in a refreshing new light!

Shana is our main protagonist and very nice she is but her foster brother Keman ( a dragon) is also a most appealing character and they are just two from a large cast, handled most skilfully by the ladies.

As is right and proper in a fantasy our heroine has lessons to learn, allies to make and strategies to plan but, towards the end of the book, the poor girl seems to be alternately rushed off her feet and sidelined. It's as though Norton and Lackey had filled a pre-allotted number of pages or - and I imagine this is more likely - had an immutable deadline looming but the last hundred or so pages of the book seem bitty and not fully formed and the end is close to a cop out. Either we're going to get a sequel and they wanted to save some good bits or they just ran out of steam but I sense a much more satisfying wrap-up existed somewhere and I wish I'd got to read it. Never mind, the book was great and I'm off to the library to hunt down the hoped-for sequel or something else by these two excellent writers.