Three kingdoms on the verge of war must unite to save each other, and a reluctant one-eyed king will raise an army of the dead to challenge an army of the damned. His human wife Ildiko must decide if she will give up the man she loves in order to save his throne.

Her son Brishen, younger prince of the Kai royal house, suddenly finds himself ruler of a kingdom blighted by a diseased darkness. In a bid for more power, the Shadow Queen of Haradis unleashes a malignant force into the world. While I found the former an intimate book, despite involving a couple of subplots and pretty intricate worldbuilding, this second installment is much wider in scope, following two separate, more defined plotlines. Radiance ends with an epilogue involving Brishen’s mother, and Eidolon starts with a very intense prologue dealing with the immediate, and catastrophic, consequences of that scene. If you like your fantasy ~pure~ and/or your romance chaste, these stories are not for you. Please note, this a fantasy series, with graphic descriptions of heterosexual sex between the two main protagonists. (I have now bought the next title in the series, The Ippos King, hoping fervently that doing so does not condemn it to seven years in the TBR.) Trying to rekindle the reading mojo, I re-read Radiance in one go, went looking for the sequel, found that I had already bought it lo, those many years ago, and kept on reading, finishing Eidolon sometime in the wee hours of Sunday. Then proceeded to let it languish in the digital TBR until Saturday night. So I did what any obsessed reader would, and checked Ms Draven’s website regularly until the second book, Eidolon, was released in early 2016–at which time, I snapped it up. I finished the book both entirely satisfied with the story, and desperate to know what would happen next in the world of the Wraith Kings, as the epilogue set it up so perfectly. I finished reading, and immediately wrote what became one of my most popular reviews on this blog. The writing voice, the worldbuilding, the plotting, the characters. Almost seven years ago, I read Ms Draven’s Radiance, and loved pretty much everything about it.

Wraith kings grace draven