The last book I read by Premee Mohamed was The Butcher of the Forest, a dark fantasy that read very much like a fairy tale, in an extremely good way. But Mohamed has a huge range, so it’s not surprising that the next work of hers that I’ve read (I’ve missed several in the meantime, but I’ve been very busy), is something completely different, a spy novel. Yes, Wickhills also uses a dark fantasy setting, which is very important to the plot, but most of the book is about trying to outmaneuver other factions within a city-state, and figuring out whom to trust, so the main flavor here is espionage. It’s a complicated novel with complicated characters that grabbed my attention from the start and held it all the way through. From the publisher’s description on NetGalley:Looking after a defecting scientist should have been Vycol Ferec’s easiest mission. But now he’s on the run from the intelligence agency he works for, dodging a handler who might have gone rogue and relying on a secret patchwork of illicit resources and dodgy contacts. Turns out his defector might be carrying an apocalypse-level magical weapon — and protecting it requires Ferec and his team to go underground, literally. Down here, the rules are very different… and the tense peace between every city in the world will shatter unless Ferec can drag their darkest secrets into the light.
