Black Throne Conspiracy

The Concordance is an interstellar power, home to squabbling nobles, dedicated soldiers, and proud families with long memories. Trying to navigate the turbulent seas of morality, honesty, and familial loyalty, injured soldier and lesser noble Sir Cobran Derithal will be tested like never before.

As he embarks on an investigation into bad omens surrounding a young woman, he’s soon running security for his libidinous cousin and courting an unpredictable heiress at his brother’s behest. But even as Cobrin applies all his cunning and hard-won experience to the tasks and challenges ahead, he finds himself at the heart of a much greater battle… one for the very souls of Concordance citizens.

The royal politics of high fantasy and the swashbuckling of space opera are rarely a match made in Heaven, but, in so many ways, Black Throne Conspiracy bucks the trends and delivers a thoroughly enthralling and enjoyable story. Sir Cobrin is an engaging, conflicted, immensely interesting protagonist, and he serves as a marvelous lens through which to learn and explore the vast machinations of the Ascension Galaxy.

With elements of thriller, whodunit, and political gamesmanship, this is a rich and immersive storytelling universe, one in which the rules are hard and fast, the narrative confident and free flowing. The political world of the Concordance is multi-tiered and impressively absorbing without being incomprehensible or losing narrative drive by descending into endless, pointless minutiae. There are no meaningless obstacles, just the elaborate wheels within wheels of a believable bureaucracy.

Though I occasionally felt adrift in a sea of lords, dukes, and other royals, Johnson-Weider does an impressive job keeping the reader afloat, never overloading you with too many names at once. With so many balls in the air, it would be easy to stumble, but, save for a small hiccup in the epilogue, the expansive plotline fires on all cylinders.

With tantalizing glimpses of neighboring interstellar governments and alien races yet to be explored, the Ascension Galaxy is ripe for further exploration, and I sincerely hope Sir Cobran and his kin have more adventures to come.