Genre: Sci-Fantasy, Romance
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay, Bi , Poly
Reviewer: Ulysses
Universal Buy Link
About The Book
It is the year 1985 ET. House Virasana has fallen, the Lotus Throne stands empty, and a bitter succession war has every noble House at arms. To make things worse, House Tô-Genji and House Medina are locked in a vicious feud over a flood of cheap illicit drugs tearing their worlds apart.
Prince Li Lan Tô-Genji is as far from the fighting as one can be. Third son of the Duke of Qufu, Li Lan is the family scholar – kept behind palace walls to preserve tradition, etiquette, and history. Brilliant, restless, and quietly furious at a life chosen for him, he steals what little freedom he can.
Sir Wilhelm Grebenstein arrives with a delegation seeking the Duke’s support for the Grebenstein claimant to the Lotus Throne. An expert swordfighter and genuine hero, he is not much taken with the dirty business of politics, but rather with the brilliant and resourceful third son of the Duke…
Then, Sir Saïd, a dashing Medina knight, is taken prisoner and exhibited in the castle of Li Lan’s father, awaiting an uncertain fate. Yet Li Lan finds him to be an honourable, passionate warrior and both of them are deeply intrigued by each other.
Saving Saïd would be treason. Leaving him would be complicity. Forced into an impossible choice, Li Lan and Wilhelm help Saïd escape – the three flee together, lighting a fuse that will reshape the Virasana Empire. Hunted across a realm in upheaval, they’ll have to fight for their lives, for their love and the reckless hope of an Empire actually worth fighting for.
A swashbuckling queer throuple romance set in the beloved Virasana Empire universe, this standalone space-opera adventure by award-winning authors Beryll and Osiris Brackhaus blends passion, peril, hope, and humour with just the right amount of heat.
The Review
I had been wondering why so much time had passed since the last book I’d read from Osiris and Beryll Brackhaus. Well, now I know: “In Love and War” is an epic 600+ pages, and I was on the edge of my seat through every one.
The timeline set is about three centuries BEFORE the rest of the books so far, including the entire Sir Yaden series. The story takes place at the violent moment when the Virasana Emperor has died, leaving no viable heir. All of the competing houses are vying for power and their chunk of the Empire’s economy. Meanwhile, a plague of drugs has triggered a separate war between two houses, while other planetary families skirmish violently over space, planets, and trade routes.
This book is the story of three young men from three powerful houses – Tô-Genji, Grebenstein, and Medina – who, by accident or by fate, come together and start a rebellion against sectional strife in order to help save what’s left of the empire.
I don’t know what sort of fortitude it takes to attempt to do a deep historical survey of a fictional empire composed of some 250 solar systems populated by those whose ancestors were all inhabitants of Earth some 2500 years earlier.
As with all of the Brackhaus books, the story is by turns cozy, romantic, funny, dark and even shockingly violent. The earthlings who settled the planetary systems that make up the Empire have apparently learned nothing.
The authors take us on a dizzying tour of cultures and customs, along with diplomacy and politics, moving by spaceship through the network of crystalline mandalas that makes interstellar travel possible. Li Lan, Wilhelm, and Saïd join forces against the stupidity and prejudice of their own houses to bring justice to the crippled Empire. As the subtitle promises, we witness the birth of the Knights of the Order of the Lotus: the Emperor’s personal squad of superheroes.
Reading this book made me go back to the first of the Brackhaus space operas: The Demon of Hagermarsh, which introduces Sir Yaden Quetzal, and his own journey to being a Lotus Knight. The world-building is richly imaginative and utterly absorbing. I have a feeling that this new book will be the first of a series of “historical” adventures set in the early days of the Virasana Empire. Hope I’m right.
Five stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.
