OFFICIAL AUTHOR BIO: Ciel Pierlot is a disaster bisexual from the San Francisco Bay Area. She’s also a giant nerd and no, you cannot stop her from bragging about her lightsaber collection. When she’s not writing SFF novels, she’s busy being a digital artist and a hardcore gaymer.

FORMAT/INFO: The Hunter's Gambit was published on June 25th, 2024 by Angry Robot. It is 400 pages long and told in third person from Kazan's point of view. It is available in paperback and ebook formats.

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: When you live in a land where vampires stalk the highways, looking for easy prey, making weapons that kill vampires is a skill in high demand. At least, that’s what Kazan hopes as she travels to show off the prized sword she has just crafted, hoping to win a contract from the Wardens who guard against the evil creatures. But Kazan’s plans are dashed when her caravan is attacked and she finds herself a prisoner of those same vampires. Now she’s a puppet queen at a secret vampire festival, a festival that will end with her death in three days. Kazan will have to use all of her cunning and skills if she’s to escape her fate - and that means making any alliance necessary.

The Hunter's Gambit is a great little escape of a book. It’s a tight quick read, as Kazan tries to escape her fate over the course of three days. I loved the plotting, which has plenty of turns and escalations that had me tearing through the pages. Although it takes a little bit for Kazan to get over the shock of her circumstances, she’s not the kind of woman to go meekly to her fate. If you’re here for a woman tearing a bloody swath through a manor full of vampires, this is the book for you.

While Kazan excels as an action heroine, I would have liked to have seen a little more time developed to her other trait: consummate liar. The author makes a point of establishing how much Kazan is known by her friends for her lies, but they are largely employed as tall tales. Kazan is caught in a web of vampire factions, and it would have been fun to see her use her lies more offensively to sow chaos. She does so to a small extent with her two potential allies, but not nearly at the scale I would have hoped for someone so renowned for their lying.

Although the bulk of the story takes place inside one manor, I could have used a little more clarification with the world-building at the front of the story. We know, for instance, that vampires and humans are at odds, that there's a whole order of warriors dedicated to defending against them. But when Kazan meets a vampire in her home town, she is oddly fine with being face to face with humanity's deadliest predator. While some of that has to do with her character, it just left me a bit confused about the state of relations between the two races.

CONCLUSION: The Hunter's Gambit is excellent power fantasy. Although the characters themselves didn't make too great an impression, the overall adventure was a fun time. By the end of the book, Kazan is bringing a real "I'm not locked in here with you, you're locked in here with me" energy to the table that was a delight to watch. If you want a popcorn fun time, this is worth checking out.