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A review by morgandhu
Closer to the Heart by Mercedes Lackey
3.0
Closer to the Heart is the second of Mercedes Lackey's Herald Spy novels, featuring Herald Mags as the spy and his lover Herald Amily as the King's Own Herald.
Mags' network of former pickpockets and street kids is now running smoothly - the "littles" working as messengers and errand boys in taverns and inns throughout Haven, and some of the older ones now being trained to service and placed in the homes of the upper class and wealthy. Not to be outdone, Amily comes up with a new scheme for placing observers in every home of note in the country. And Mags finds an unusual source of clever gadgets for the discerning secret agent or assassin. Meanwhile, there is a plot afoot to drag Valdemar into a very messy political situation, and that occupies our heroes for the latter half of the book.
I must confess to a degree of ambivalence about where this series is going. I like reading about spycraft, and this series, while light on adventures and battles and the like, spends a lot of time looking at the daily lives of people who gather information for their government. Being Heralds, they all have the purest of motives, but still... this is getting uncomfortably close to the paranoid state of many governments today, where there are as many surveillance cameras capturing every moment of our lives as possible, and laws protecting privacy are being eroded left, right and centre.
It's still fun to read about this stuff in a fantasy world, but the darker implications of spywork aimed at people not even suspected of wrong-doing is leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Mags' network of former pickpockets and street kids is now running smoothly - the "littles" working as messengers and errand boys in taverns and inns throughout Haven, and some of the older ones now being trained to service and placed in the homes of the upper class and wealthy. Not to be outdone, Amily comes up with a new scheme for placing observers in every home of note in the country. And Mags finds an unusual source of clever gadgets for the discerning secret agent or assassin. Meanwhile, there is a plot afoot to drag Valdemar into a very messy political situation, and that occupies our heroes for the latter half of the book.
I must confess to a degree of ambivalence about where this series is going. I like reading about spycraft, and this series, while light on adventures and battles and the like, spends a lot of time looking at the daily lives of people who gather information for their government. Being Heralds, they all have the purest of motives, but still... this is getting uncomfortably close to the paranoid state of many governments today, where there are as many surveillance cameras capturing every moment of our lives as possible, and laws protecting privacy are being eroded left, right and centre.
It's still fun to read about this stuff in a fantasy world, but the darker implications of spywork aimed at people not even suspected of wrong-doing is leaving a bitter aftertaste.