His Salvation is Claire’s addition to the Cavalieri Della Morte series. (And do you know how hard it is to type Claire when your name is Clara?) It’s the 4th book in the series, and the 3rd I’ve reviewed here. It looks like it may have some overlap with the next book in the series, which is India R. Adams’ Ivy’s Poison. But, as that doesn’t come out until next week, I can’t say for sure.
So, Salvation is the story of Kay and Evelyn. Now, before you look at me or Claire and say, but ladies, Kay is a girl’s name, keep in mind that a lot of names that we now think of as exclusively girl’s names started out as male names, like Marion, which was John Wayne’s birth name. Anyway, Kay is an old name out of Wales and Latin, which is an interesting mix, if you look at it, but those old Romans got around. It means happy or rejoicing, which I find to be really interesting. Yes, I fell down the rabbit hole when I was looking at names. More useless trivia for the trivia monster who lives in my head.
In the original Arthurian tales, Merlin took infant Arthur from his parents to keep him safe from anyone who might want to hurt him. He gave Arthur to Sir Ector to raise. In some stories, Ector knew who Arthur was, in others, he didn’t. Ector already had a son named Kay. Please, don’t ask me how much of the Arthurian tales I already knew before I even started reading the CDM series. I may end up embarrassing myself. And I swear, Disney’s The Sword in the Stone had nothing to do with my Arthurian education. Probably. Yeah, I’m rambling today.
So, Kay. Assassin of the Cavalieri Della Morte. Doesn’t fail. Doesn’t kill innocents. Has a Spidey Sense. Just about to get into serious trouble. He’s in Rome and his hit has just gone bad. The target somehow got switched on him and now Russian pros are on his tail. Injured and bleeding, he has to get away from them somehow. He needs a car that no one has seen him with. So what does he do? He carjacks a pretty tourist.
Evelyn is a British tourist. She just won a luxury trip to Rome, and is sitting outside in her car, trying to find the paperwork she needs so that she can check into the hotel, when a stranger gets into her car, points a gun at her, and then carjacks her. She’s pretty sure that she isn’t going to live another minute, but he drags her into a No-Tell Motel, and the story builds from there.
OK, Kay. I’m not sure what I feel about Kay. I know that I’m not neutral on him, but other than that, he’s confusing AF to me. I think he’s confusing himself right now, and I’m pretty sure he’s confused Evelyn all to fuck. I think that Kay was emotionally stuck a little bit, which could be why I have a hard time getting a good read on him. He goes back and forth between different emotional states. I think I really like that. I think that it made him a lot more human than he might otherwise have been. Claire showed us a flawed man who is trying to come to grasp with things that are beyond his control.
Evelyn. Hmmmm… Most of the time I thought that she was a pretty good character. She didn’t really do the damsel in distress thing, except when it was appropriate to the story, but even then, she wasn’t going to go gently into that good night. She was going to fight as hard as she could and leave her mark. I do think that she was slightly naive a couple of times, at least towards the beginning, and Kay may have been an asshole for being as blunt as he was when he was explaining the facts of life to her, but I think she needed to hear it bluntly to get it into her head.
There are a couple of things that happened that I didn’t really guess, but it was more like wouldn’t it be interesting if… There were other things that I thought the same thing about which didn’t happen. I’ll leave it to you to try and guess which ones were which.
OK, that’s all for this one. Go check it out, as well as all the other CDM books. Happy reading!
In Between the Pages 