The Devil's Fire by Matt Tomerlin ISBN: 9780615916507
Series: Devil's Fire #1
Published by Matt Tomerlin on August 8, 2011
Genres: Historical Fiction
Pages: 300
Goodreads | The StoryGraph
Amazon, Bookshop.org, Better World Books, Book Depository
When the notorious Captain Griffith murders a merchant sailor and claims his young wife, he inadvertently sparks a bloody chain of events that will alter the course of piracy in the Caribbean forever.Dragged aboard a fearsome brigantine named Harbinger, the fire-haired Katherine Lindsay must survive Griffith's sadistic quartermaster, who firmly believes that women bring bad luck upon a ship. With no means of escape on the horizon, she quickly befriends a dashing young deckhand and a cowardly surgeon. As Katherine grows accustomed to life among pirates, she finds it increasingly difficult to resist her attraction to their dangerous lifestyle and the thrill of high-seas adventure. But the memory of her dead husband weighs heavily on her conscience, and her rising guilt may prove to be the ultimate undoing of her captors.Pirate lovers will find no shortage of treachery, cutlass duels, ship-to-ship battles, buried treasure and much, much more.
Characters: 9, all of the characters were somewhere between morally grey and psychopaths, and each was distinct from the others. I had no trouble telling them apart, and keeping up with the growth and stagnancy of each.
Atmosphere: 9, though it was violent and gory, I could picture everything from the shipboard battles to Nassau to the jungle. I’d call this both character and plot-driven, and it kept me engaged to the point of tuning out the rest of the world and devouring it within days.
Writing: 8, I didn’t get thrown out of the story, but I would’ve liked a little more inner-life-of-the-character. Despite that, nothing was projected of the resolution before it happened, the dialogue to description ratio felt natural, and there was a good mix of modern and historic nautical terminology so the atmosphere remained without the writing feeling stiff and archaic.
Plot: 10, I do love morally complex characters. It was occasionally a little too violent for me and I found myself physically tensing while reading- but the violence feels appropriate for the fact that these are pirates, some of which were pure sadists, some of which numbed themselves to violence to survive, all of which lived in a world run by the uncaring elite and so had very few opportunities for power available to them. I will definitely be reading the rest of the books in the series…even though I wasn’t ever fully rooting for Katherine, her transition was both fascinating and compelling.
Intrigue: 9, I tried to figure out how it could possibly end happily for anyone while keeping the characters respectable (except for Livingston, who I assume was modeled after Ned Lowe and others of his ilk). I couldn’t have predicted it, and happily so. The plot was rollicking and wild and also absolutely correct and natural in pacing and consequence. As pirate adventures go, this is one of the better ones I’ve read.
Logic: 8, some of the characters don’t employ much in the way of logic and consistency, or else their motivations are fluid. But for the most part, the rules of the world and the needs of the characters are consistently adhered to.
Enjoyment: 10, this drew me in and kept me glued to it, despite my reading it while on vacation at Disney World (a far less violent and more distracting place than this story). Thank you to everyone who recommended this to me over the years!
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
Leave a Reply