The Vengeance by Emma Newman

I would like to thank Solaris for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Solaris

Published – Out Now

Price - £9.99 paperback £5.99 ebook

Morgane grew up at sea, daughter of the fierce pirate captain of the Vengeance, raised to follow in her footsteps as scourge of the Four Chains Trading Company. But when Anna-Marie is mortally wounded in battle, she confesses to Morgane that she is not her mother.

The captain of the enemy ship reveals he was paid to kill Anna-Marie and bring Morgane home to France and her real family. Desperate to learn the truth about her lineage, Morgane spares him, leaving the Vengeance and everything she knows behind.

Her quest reveals a world of decadence and darkness, in which monsters vie for control of royal courts and destinies of nations. She discovers the bloody secrets of the Four Chains Trading Company, and the truth about her real mother’s death, nearly twenty years before...

The adventure story also has a long history. Sitting alongside fantasy we have many tales of derring do from the legends of Robin Hood, the adventure stories of Robert Louis Stevenson to modern incarnations where adventurers trot the globe and occasionally save it too. These are stories that very much eat plot by the page and rarely let up. Now starting The Vampires of Dumas, a new series which will feature multiple authors in the same world starts with Emma Newman bringing us The Vengeance a tale of a young woman who finds out her family history is not what she thought and finds herself travelling to 18th century France to find the truth and extract revenge but monsters are awaiting her too. While an adventure is had I did find some of the old school choices didn’t really grab me as much as I was hoping for.

Morgane is the daughter of one of the most feared pirates of the high seas. Captain Anna-Marie of the Vengeance is infamous but also very skilled bar a peculiar weakness for destroying the ships of the powerful Four Chains company. But her latest adventure ends in a trap that mortally wounds the Captain. On her deathbed she reveals to Morgane that she is actually only her aunt and she must avoid her mother. Morgane though is intrigued to find amongst the possessions left to her a letter from her real mother asking her to return to France. To both find her parent and also find the person responsible for this deadly trap Morgane leaves her ship to France and upon arrival finds herself being hunted by many men some of whom are far less human than she expected.

On the one hand if you’ve ever read older adventure stories then the format of this story should be familiar but with a modern perspective. It’s a bit of a pinball machine where with every chapter there is some revelation, action or betrayal. We quickly move from a pirate ship to dockyard fights and escape to dangerous woods and even more dangerous chateaus. A variety of opponents are thrown at Morgane and she must work through them with wit, allies, sword, pistol or just bloodymindemess. Newman makes a pirate woman the hero and even adds in a sapphic romance as a love interest in the form of a governess appears. There are plenty of culture clashes with a very earthy Morgane meeting French polite society and neither quite get the other proves grounds for some comedic interactions.

But equally this book carries some of the issues of the old adventure story. Morgane as our central character I find a little inconsistent. For a young woman who has lived with pirates, fought and killed and stolen she often appears very naïve and unworldly not even knowing the map of the world. She seems easily wrongfooted by people being duplicitous and this feels at odds with the idea of a woman pirate we first meet and very quickly say goodbye to. The revelations about her family don’t really hit home as much as I was expecting and so she loses more the personal motivation that the reader may be expecting to feel as she goes on this mission.

My other issue is the pacing feeling quite uneven. We spend a lot of time setting up Morgane’s need for vengeance but then we seem to tread water going to France and travelling around. For a relatively short read it often felt to be holding back and only very late on do the more fantastical monsters and main villains appear and start to change the shape of the tale. Certain factions are introduced but not really explained. The overall feeling is that this feels very much the first part of a bigger story but without either the necessary cliffhanger and growth of the character or development of the world. There feels a lot more to explore and explain but in some ways the story resets too at the end which is an odd experience to turn the final page on.

I had fun with The Vengeance as a quick breezy adventure tale but possibly more via recognizing the stories it was paying homage to but I kept wanting the story to launch into a higher gear and really show a little more 21st century teeth vampiric or otherwise as this is a rich period to explore and contrast with our own. If you fancy a relaxing adventure tale for a summer read this may be up your street but I think we need to see a bit more of the series now planned before we can decide on its wider success.