Title: His Mortal Demise
Author: Vanessa Le
Genres: Fantasy, Romance
Pages: 391
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Copy: Received eARC via NetGalley
Availability: Available now
Summary: Kochin is a heartsooth — a rare being with the ability to heal any wound. Any wound, that is, except death.
Intent on defying nature and bringing Nhika back to life, Kochin keeps her body in a life-preserving casket and waits for a miracle. Stricken with grief and descending into madness, Kochin realizes the answer to his desperate quest can only lie in one place: Yarong, the lush yet battle-ridden island the first heartsooths called home.
Months later, Nhika wakes in a familiar manor-house, with Kochin nowhere to be found. As she traces his footsteps across Theumas, she discovers the haunting path he walked to bring her back, and a world changed by war.
When Kochin discovers the true and grisly way to resurrect a person from the grave, he must decide exactly how much he is willing to sacrifice, in order to reunite with the woman he loves…
Review: [Note: His Mortal Demise includes a significant amount of body horror, including summaries of medical experimentation by a colonial power and detailed descriptions of injuries. In addition to this, one character enlists in a war, and there are serious injuries and death that occur in that portion of the book, including a sequence where a character is trapped in a partially collapsed building. There are also repeated, but short, incidents involving animal death.]
I absolutely loved The Last Bloodcarver, so I was very excited to get my hands on its sequel/conclusion, His Mortal Demise. On a structural level, author Vanessa Le’s decision to split the story into past (Kochin) and present (Nhika) made it possible to have two mysteries being investigated simultaneously: how to bring Nhika back to life and what happened to Kochin after he succeeded? Presenting the story strictly linearly would have undercut the first half of Nhika’s scenes as the reader would already know all the answers, but jumping back and forth between the two timelines was a great way to ramp up tension and inspire dread as Kochin’s point of view got nearer and nearer to the present.
I said in my review of The Last Bloodcarver that it took a while for me to warm up to Kochin, and I’m happy to report that I was immediately rooting for him (and his desperate desire to bring Nhika back to life) from the start in this book. It was fascinating to be in his point of view and get to understand his outlook on his life and his power. Following him into actual war as he tried to figure out exactly what he would or wouldn’t do in order to bring her back made for a compelling, if occasionally horrifying, journey. When Kochin found his moral/ethical line, it was a relief, even if it made things so much more difficult for him. In the last book, we spent a lot of time with Nhika making small connections with her family/heritage, and I appreciated that we got to explore Kochin’s relationship with heartsoothing and his family this time.
Nhika’s plotline of trying to figure out what had happened to Kochin and how the world had changed during her death was also a lot of fun. While the Congmi family took much more of a backseat in this book than the previous one, they were still a solid support for Nhika as she tried to track down what had happened to Kochin. I loved the slow reveals from her point of view, many of which provided ominous clues to what would be happening in Kochin’s story. And when Nhika and Kochin’s plots finally reconnected, it was immensely satisfying to see their devotion to each other rewarded.
Recommendation: If you enjoyed the first book in this duology, His Mortal Demise is a worthy sequel and conclusion. The dual narratives allow for two mysterious to be explored simultaneously and keep the suspense high until the plot lines finally converge. While the war isn’t wrapped up by the end of the book, the character arcs end in a satisfying place, and the genuinely hopeful ending leaves a reader believing that all will be well, eventually. The duology was a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to what Vanessa Le writes next.