200 years after Camber series, about a 17 year old king. Much more action oriented. I really enjoyed it. ( )

Bishop's Heir, while technically the second series of Kelson books, is as much about his friends Morgan and Duncan as it is about Kelson. These aren't quite as good as the first series, but still enjoyable reading. ( )

A truly great series, but the original trilogy is still the best. ( )

Honestly, I'm quite disappointed in this second trilogy. The first two books are extremely lackluster compared to the first trilogy. The third book is not only lackluster, but has a total bummer of an ending that didn't even feel in keeping with the characters Kurtz established. It's almost as if she decided to tell the story of Job instead of Kelson. ( )

Though the world of Kurtz's Deryni books quite definitely counts as a fantasy, she also has a deep knowledge of medieval history and culture - and it shows. The material conditions of life, and the social relations among individuals, spring to vivid life in her prose, and not just in dramatic moments. In Kurtz's world, the sodden cloak of a messenger steaming by a fire merits as much description as a ducal seal, and the King has a relationship with his page every bit as real and psychologically convincing as that with his most trusted adviser. For all that it's a fantasy, the novel breathes realism.

This stands the book in good stead, since the plot centers around political maneuvering connected with a sectarian conflict between an intensely conservative bishop and the more liberal king. The conflict revolves around questions as to how both Church and State should regard the Deryni, a long-suppressed and villified minority group possessed of powers that other non-gifted humans find terrifying. In an earlier trilogy, the conservatives led by Archbishop Lorris were defeated; but now he has escaped his prison, and has allied himself with a group of separatists from the subjugated region of Meara. The politics become quite involved. In lesser hands, this might have become tedious. In Kurtz's, it does not. She takes the typical moves and countermoves of medieval politics - negotiation by messenger, excommunication, counter-excommunication, hostage-taking, marriages - and turns them into a vivid narrative.

It is that final move - marriage - that lies at the center of that narrative. For all that it concerns politics and armed conflict, the book is at heart a love story tracing the slow romance between the young King Kelson and Sidana - Princess of the Mearan separatists, and Kelson's hostage. It is their fraught but inevitable progress from first glances to the altar that drives the book to its conclusion.

And what a conclusion! So dramatic, and so amazingly untypical, that the final pages of the book can barely contain it. I have read hundreds of fantasy novels, and many of the medieval verse romances they hark back to, but I am hard pressed to think of a parallel in either tradition. To take an example from further afield, the final paragraph of Oscar Wilde's fairy tale "The Star Child" violates the conventions of that genre just as flagrantly as Kurtz violates the conventions of fantasy.

If you prefer all your fantasies to reach a neat, tidy ending, then I cannot recommend this book to you. But if you would like something edgy, in which the waves of fantasy break suddenly on shoals of submerged reality, then "The Bishop's Heir" will not disappoint. ( )