Review: Platinum Tinted Darkness by Timothy Wolff
Blurb:
The Kingdom of Boulom has been lost.
The realms have already seen what happens when the Gods and their Harbingers are left unchecked.
Destruction.
Chaos.
Death.
The Gods can't be trusted. No one knows that better than David Williams, the Leader of the Guardians tasked to protect the Realm from the Gods and their powerful Harbingers ever since the fall of Boulom.
Six Guardians take their pledge to leave the squabbles of the kingdoms behind and live only to stop the Harbingers and protect the Realms from the Gods.
Serenna Morgan, a famed Crystal Mage and Guardian, struggles with the Guardian Pact when the Kingdom of Terrangus invades her home.
She's supposed to stay out of it.
But she can't.
When she breaks her Oath and joins in the skirmish, she earns the favor of the God of Death when the conflict escalates to an all-out war.
And he makes her an offer, one that'll make sure she'll never fail in her goals again.
To become his Harbinger.
To partake in the ecstasy of destruction.
Review:
Platinum Tinted Darkness is the first of The Legacy of Boulom, a trilogy by the wonderful Timothy Wolff. It feels like the love child of Sebastien De Castell and Steven Erikson in terms of its enjoyability and worldbuilding.
The premise is relatively straightforward: there’s six guardians that defend the realm against Harbringers, powerful beings that work at the behest of one of the gods. One of these guardians, Serenna, breaks her guardianship to protect her home country from an invading force earning the eye, good favor, and temptations of the god of Death.
From there, we see Serenna’s struggles with morality and her oath, as well as meet the two other major POV’s: David, a cynical veteran and leader of the guardians & Zeen, a hopeful and skilled young soldier. There are other POV’s present, including the cruel and narcissistic Nyfe, but we mainly stick with this trio of interesting, flawed heroes.
I have fallen for you and now I have a weakness.
It’s a fast paced book that’s full of fights, dark moments, cheesy lines, and breathtaking twists, hence the Sebastien De Castell comparison. Combined with menacing, untrustworthy gods using people as pawns (a la Steven Erikson), Platinum is a book that feels like the combination of Greatcoats and Malazan.
The thing I found most interesting about the book (other than the gods manipulating the world), were the character motivations. Wolff expertly drops you into their heads and each of the POV’s feel distinct and recognizable. Witnessing characters make damning decisions, and understanding why they walk their paths, was fantastic.
Honor is the most useless concept since hope.
Wolff doesn’t have any weak facets of this book. The action, dialog, prose, character development, and world-building are all rather good, however, they’re all at a “good to great” level instead of having any at “elite” level. Additionally, there are a few questionable moments in this book, mainly some of the decisions the characters make border on “forced for the plot”. A few of the fights feel a bit repetitive and MMO-esque. Some of the world-building feels illogical.
None of these issues slowed me down. I tore through this book, greatly enjoyed it, and am prioritizing getting to the sequel ASAP. The writing is gorgeous (I picked it up because I saw Wolff reading quotes from random pages and each one was great. Seriously, the guy can write), and the meddling gods angle really worked for me.
If you’re looking for a well rounded book from an extremely promising author with some JRPG/MMO influences sprinkled in, this book is for you.
