{"id":527,"date":"2008-03-26T10:04:59","date_gmt":"2008-03-26T15:04:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danversreads.wordpress.com\/?p=527"},"modified":"2008-03-26T10:04:59","modified_gmt":"2008-03-26T15:04:59","slug":"house-of-cards-ce-murphy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/?p=527","title":{"rendered":"House of Cards ~ C.E. Murphy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/house_of_cards.jpg\" title=\"house_of_cards.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/danversreads.files.wordpress.com\/2008\/03\/house_of_cards.thumbnail.jpg\" alt=\"house_of_cards.jpg\" align=\"left\" \/><\/a><i>New York City&#8217;s only legal counsel to the fabled Old Races, Margrit Knight, is level headed in all matters extraordinary. But when she&#8217;s summoned to negotiate a peace treaty among rival factions, her own mortal world threatens to fall apart. Margrit&#8217;s been in hot water before, but reentering the underworld brings a new set of problems.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>The second book in Murphy&#8217;s Negotiator series stands on solid ground after a disappointing start with <i>Heart of Stone<\/i>. Juggling a large cast of characters can&#8217;t be easy, especially when they all have unique personalities, and I think this is where the first book stumbled a bit. Clearly, though, Murphy has taken all of those characters and the many plot lines in this series in hand because <i>House of Cards<\/i> moves at a much faster pace.<\/p>\n<p>One of the things that I appreciate regarding this series are the selkies, gargoyles and djinn; I wouldn&#8217;t go so far to say that dragons are a dime a dozen in genre fiction these days, but certainly dragons and vampires are more familiar to readers. <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Selkies#Legends\" target=\"_blank\">Selkies<\/a>? Not so much. But they play a very large role in <i>House of Cards<\/i> and I just bet they&#8217;re going to cause lots of trouble in any future installments. Similarly, djinn are fascinating and often under represented (with the wonderful exception of Rachel Caine&#8217;s Weather Warden series,) as are gargoyles. I love reading about the history of each of the Old Races, but the lyricism of legends are far more present with these three.<\/p>\n<p>If you can stick out the much slower paced first book, <i>Heart of Stone<\/i>, I think you&#8217;ll find <i>House of Cards<\/i> to be a satisfying addition to the urban fantasy genre.<\/p>\n<p><b><a href=\"http:\/\/cemurphy.net\/index.php\/teasers-from-upcoming-novels\/the-negotiator\/heart-of-stone\/\" target=\"_blank\">Heart of Stone<\/a><\/b> Excerpt | <b><a href=\"http:\/\/cemurphy.net\/index.php\/teasers-from-upcoming-novels\/the-negotiator\/teaser-house-of-cards\/\" target=\"_blank\">House of Cards<\/a><\/b> Excerpt<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>New York City&#8217;s only legal counsel to the fabled Old Races, Margrit Knight, is level headed in all matters extraordinary. But when she&#8217;s summoned to negotiate a peace treaty among rival factions, her own mortal world threatens to fall apart. Margrit&#8217;s been in hot water before, but reentering the underworld brings a new set of&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fantasy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6V6sR-8v","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}