A Good Assassin is Hard to Find

So, first things first. That is a niiiiice cover. That is a cover that you take to a fancy dinner in a restaurant with more than one type of fork.

So fancy

Now to the insides of The Assassin's Curse by Cassandra Rose Clarke: Ananna, the only daughter of a powerful pirate family, is about to be engaged to the most handsome man she's ever seen. 

Unfortunately, Ananna has no intention of sailing under a banner that doesn't have ANANNA in a large bold font. Also, her future finance has the seriously suicidal intention to drive his new fleet of shiny ships into the Isles of the Sky. Where people are turned into frogs.

So, no thanks. Ananna camels it out of there with with a soundtrack of her ex-fiance screaming that his family will hire an assassin to hunt her down. But those are just stories, aren't they?

So she thinks up to the moment when an assassin tries to slice her into pieces in the marketplace. When a mysterious marketplace woman (TM) offers her a way to avoid almost certain death, she takes it. For how is she supposed to know that it will bind her to a young assassin and start her on an impossible adventure?

Google "Mysterious Marketplace Lady" and this is what you get. Not a perfect search engine.

If you're looking for something to read after Arabian Nights, this is a book for you. It's a dashing adventures with lots of derring-do, swashbuckling, market chases, narrow escapes and pirate ships. Ananna is a spunky heroine with a unique voice which makes this book well worth checking out.

The developing romance angle didn't quite work for me but your mileage may vary with the "Zounds! Handcuffed Together With My Total Opposite And Yet The More Time Where Are Force to Spend Together, The More Smouldering This Sexual Tension Becomes!" It's a proud and noble trope to be sure, but not a trope that I would not want to sail to sea with.

The Assassin's Curse is an intriguing start to a series and I look forward to see what mysterious isles it travels to next in The Pirate's Wish (available in June 4, 2013).