Mr Dart smiled guilelessly at them. "Do I surprise you? You know, I trust, that there is no need to fear magic any longer."
"It -- it is hardly in fashion," Madam Veitch managed, in a shaky voice.
"It will be," Mr Dart replied...[loc. 365]
Following their improbable escape from Orio Prison -- the best practical exercise in literary criticism I've encountered in fiction -- Jemis, Mr Dart and Hal find themselves guests in a remote manor house, snowed in and without transportation. Naturally, a murder mystery ensues: but this is fantasy, so there is also an unexpected unicorn, a possibly-invisible butler, some peculiarly inappropriate dishes at dinner, a couple more friends from university (there is always another Morrowlea graduate), the mysterious Ironwood heiress, a complete run of the New Salon (with its potentially libellous articles about Jemis Greenwing, his father, et cetera), and the sudden arrival of the Hunter in Green, whose identity is at last revealed.
Also, only one bed. And Mr Dart finally emerging from behind his good manners and mushroom-picking to become his best self.
An absolute delight. Jemis is greatly changed by his experiences in the previous novel (it's as though somebody told him 'talk less, smile more') and I suspect that Mr Dart's transformation also owes something to those events, and the ensuant messages. The atmosphere is suitably, traditionally claustrophobic, with recalcitrant servants (the phrase "I'm sure I couldn't say" crops up repeatedly), a hall crammed with potentially-valuable 'collectibles', a mysteriously unsociable host who declines to join his guests for dinner, and snow up to the first-floor windows. There's also a growing sense that Jemis' adventures aren't solely affecting Jemis and his friends: the world (or at least Rondé, the country in which those adventures take place) is changing, and matters both political and religious are coming to the boil.
Two ways in which these are not typical fantasy novels: our protagonists have not ridden anywhere on horseback -- they walk (or, if Jemis, run) or ride in carriages -- and there is no map of Rondé. I would really like a map ...
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