Review: An Instruction in Shadow By Benedict Jacka

Blurb:

The ultra-rich control magic—the same way they control everything else—but Stephen Oakwood may just beat them at their own game in this exhilarating contemporary fantasy from the author of the Alex Verus novels.

Stephen Oakwood has emerged victorious against the schemes of his aristocratic family. Now he finally has the opportunity to do what he’s been wanting to do for a long time: track down his father.  

But doing so won’t be easy. Stephen’s not so isolated any more, but the contacts he’s making in the magical world—everyone from the corporation he works for to the mother he’s just beginning to reconnect with—all have agendas of their own. And now a new group is emerging from the shadows, calling themselves the Winged. Their leader, the mysterious Byron, promises that he can show Stephen how to find his father...but he wants something in return.

Following that trail will throw Stephen into greater danger than he’s ever faced before. To survive, he’ll need to use all of his tricks and sigls, and pick up some new ones. Only then will he be able to prevail against his enemies...and find out who’s really pulling the strings.

Review:

The good news is that magic, or rather drucraft in the parlance of Jacka’s world, is real.

The bad news is that, just like every other valuable resource in the world, it has been commercialized and packaged through a system that disproportionately benefits the wealthy and leaves everyone else hanging.

Stephen, our immensely likeable and gifted protagonist, is barely scraping by. After his father mysteriously disappears, he finds himself doing odd jobs that are barely adequate to sustain a living, and a city like London can be rather unkind to folks without deep pockets.

In the first iteration of the series, An inheritance of magic, we saw him get entangled with his mother’s side of the family for the first time. To his surprise, Stephen discovers that his mother comes from a rather rich background - a noble house with immense wealth and resources at their disposal. While he has been struggling to find resources about magic, his cousins have been attending elite magical schools and have access to best-in-class resources.

However, none of these resources are available to Stephen. The head of the family cares nothing about him, and everyone else has an agenda of their own. The members of the House Ashford are perpetually scheming to backstab other family members, and despite being an outsider, Stephen finds himself embroiled in deep and complicated plots around family inheritance, which he is utter unequipped to navigate on his own.

However, as the story progresses, we do see him making strong alliances and getting a better understanding of the world of noble houses. Jacka’s take on magic being deeply intertwined with politics and economics is nuanced and refreshing on one hand, and directly relatable to problems in the real world on the other.

I loved the elements of world building and the system of magic. There is a quite a bit of depth to explore, and the intricacies of the magic system and power plays involved are introduced in bits as the storyline progresses in a manner that never feels overwhelming.

In the latest iteration, we see Stephen exploring new leads about his father, and getting involved with another major player in the world of magic - a cult that has developed a strange interest in him. Stephen has now learned to wholeheartedly embrace skepticism, and continues to build upon his rare abilities, while also more systematically leveraging his new alliances to cautiously approach opportunities that seem too good to be true.

The second book, An Instruction in Shadow, was just as fast-paced and enjoyable as the first one, and I completed it in a single sitting. Jacka’s Alex Verus series is well known to urban fantasy enthusiasts, and in this series he continues to impress with his fluid and approachable presentation.

Besides the book being relatively short, my only complaint is that the ending felt somewhat abrupt. This book was not as much of an emotional ride, and I would have loved to see Hobbes, Stephen’s pet cat, play a more significant role in the story after the events of the first book. Not that this takes away anything from the plot, which did progress into newer, interesting branches. 

Needless to say, I’d be eagerly looking forward to the next book in the series.