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Review: Flames of the Arcane – Nicole Dennis

Flames of the Arcane - Nicole Dennis

Genre: Fantasy, Romance

LGBTQ+ Category: Gay

Reviewer: Ulysses, Paranormal Romance Guild

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About The Book

Welcome, Traveler, to Errante Ame’s Carnival of Mysteries!

What you see before you is no mere vagabond circus. Indeed, our show is full of wonders and delights that will leave you breathless, but whether that is with amazement or dread depends entirely upon you. We are unlike any other band of creatures you have ever encountered — and you few brave souls who choose to step beyond your mundane expectations and join us may witness sights beyond your wildest imaginings.

So sit back, relax, and let us entertain you. For time and worlds are fleeting, but each soul has a tale to tell.

What happens when a life full of secrets goes up in flames in order to save all you love?

Solomon Windham protects the realms, but secrets warp around and alter his life when shadows start flickering around Lunore Academy. Dangers that involve Solomon, his magic and altering his life of a quiet professor.

An adventure and plan drags him far beyond the quiet Nucira Realm and deep into the hard of danger. Only he can stand in the middle of a battle to save the realms, his friends and the beating magic of his heart.

What could survive on the other side of broken secrets?

Flames of the Arcane is part of the multi-author Carnival of Mysteries Series. Each book stands alone, but each one includes at least one visit to Errante Ame’s Carnival of Mysteries, a magical, multiverse traveling show full of unusual acts, games, and rides. The Carnival changes to suit the world it’s on, so each visit is unique and special. This book contains a pair of reluctant heroes, a vast adventure, swords and fighting, several sets of interfering vines, and the beginnings of a guaranteed HEA.

The Review:

We’re back in the realm of Nucira, the easternmost realm of a world of magic where the boundaries and the politics are all driven by magic. Solomon Windham is a professor at the Lunore Academy, and has developed a relationship with Cormac Wyn, a druid scientist who came to Lunore to help his cousin Emrys Cadogan in the previous book of this double-series (Dryads on Fire). 

Mac Wyn is not just a scientist but an entrepreneur, and travels through the various magic-bound realms of this world. He is about to break it off with Solomon because of all of Solomon’s secrets. And therein lies the crux of this story. 

Solomon is an arcane wizard—the most powerful of his kind in all the realms. His very existence, however, is a secret, and a danger to him and to the Lunore Academy. He can never travel outside of Nucira, and never tell those around him the truth. 

Until the death of a child, a wizard with arcane power, reveals a dark conspiracy that not only threatens Solomon and his beloved academy, but the entire world. To save what he loves, Solomon will have to travel through the realms, and to do that he’ll have to reveal his secret to everyone he cares about. 

It’s a hair-raising, and magically complex adventure, in which Errante Ame and his Carnival play one critical part. There is a lot of time spent at the Carnival, and some really nice description of it from a traveler’s viewpoint; but in this book, the Carnival has a single purpose. 

In keeping with the general tone of this second season of the Carnival of Mysteries, we get a much stronger sense of exactly who or what Errante Ame is. Ame and his Carnival is legendary across many worlds. The world of Nucira is entirely magical, but also full of familiar technology like cellphones and mag-lev trains. It makes for a fascinating read, even as Dennis’s characters capture your head and your heart.  

4 stars.

The Reviewer

Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.

Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.

By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.

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