Stealing the Elf-King's Roses Mass Market Paperback – November 1, 2002

I am a fan of Diane Duane's and I expect certain hominess to her characters. It was all there. The intelligent alt-species were great and the eventual denouement was full of surprises.

There is a teaser for The Case of the Elf Killers at the end of Stealing the Elf King's Roses. After poking about on Amazon I cannot find the book.

Don't be withholding and mean now.. when will it release? Inquiring minds want to read it... NOW!!!

I have really enjoyed the author's young wizards series. I wanted to like this book as well. The protagonists are interesting and their relationship is a strong point. Unfortunately, the plot drags and I had to force myself to continue at times. As much as I liked the concept of embodied Justice, I disliked the ending which seemingly tried to cover all ideas possible and therefore made limited sense. I would read a follow up novel with these characters, but if you are new to this author's work I suggest starting with "So You Want to be a Wizard."

great view of world view totally new to me

Interesting take on the alternate worlds theory. The protagonist is a lanthanomancer (Look That up! Hah!) in a world that acts a lot like Los Angeles, but with magic, sort of. Turns out there are a finite number of similar worlds, and something's amiss. Clever premise, clever execution, not very inventive closure. The end was a bit new-agy for my taste but it all hangs together. Worth the money.

Take a fantasy world and bump it into the present time...
Well, I usualy like Diane Duane's stuff, but this one just seemed a bit too typical of the fantasy genre. It's a good fantasy book, but nothing really elevates it form the common crowd. The way her young wizard series is written is much better.

This book has some riveting concepts: justice as a being who shows up in court, prosecutors who do thier own investigations, and an affectionate and protective but non-romantic relationship between work partners. It kept my attention until near the end when it became a major letdown. It seemed like it was finished way to fast, without a real good explanation of why it was ending that way. In fact, when I finished the last page, my main response was "Huh?" It seemed like Duane just wanted to finish it to meet a deadline, instead of taking the time to carry the extreme characterization and detail to the end for a longer but much more coherent novel. I was rather disappointed.

Fantasy has always turned on the willingness and ability of a small group of people (sometimes only one) to "change the world," and Diane Duane (one of my favorite writers), in her ongoing Young Wizards series, has always proceeded on the principle (reversing Arthur C. Clarke) that "any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology." Here she gives us what may be her ultimate example of these truisms to date. Liayna "Lee" Enfield lives in a world that calls itself Earth, but it isn't *our* Earth. Here office-type high-tech is even techier than ours, "smart houses" are apparently so commonplace that even a private investigator can afford to own one, and people commute in aerial vehicles called "hovs." It isn't paradise: crime exists, right up through murder, and there are traffic jams and air pollution--but there is no word or concept for genocide, and world wars are apparently unknown, though nuclear weapons have been invented. Worldgates connect it to five other "alternate Earths," including one where space travel is so commonplace that aliens routinely visit Earth--and one, Alfheim, which is the home of both the Elves (immortal, incredibly beautiful hominids) and the allotropic ("fairy") gold that powers the Gates; there's even a fivefold UN and Interpol. It's also a world where God and Christ (though referred to in those terms) are both female, and where a human (Lee) can partner with a "madra"--a 40"-tall intelligent canid (his people were originally from Alfheim, though why they left is never explained) who, though he doesn't have hands, can speak English by way of an implant and even drive a hov, which automatically modifies itself to suit him when he gets behind the controls. And where, though no one uses the word "magic," the living Power of Justice visits the courtroom after arguments have closed and both pronounces and enforces the verdict (in the very first chapter we see a dishonest entertainment promoter literally transformed into a large weasel, apparently with its human mind still intact). Lee and her partner Gelert are psychically gifted "mantics"--private detectives of a kind, but also authorized to argue in court, usually for the prosecution--who have the ability, respectively, to See and Scent what has happened in a given locality within a certain window of time, and, as we eventually learn, to also See and Scent hidden truths about what's going on there *now*. When an Elven communications-industry exec is murdered in Ellay (their version of Los Angeles), they expect at first that it will prove to be just another investigation. But before long it morphs into a complex mosaic of conspiracy, economic and racial jealousy, and interworld moral contagion, fuelled in part by the recent discovery of "our" Earth (called Terra), and they find themselves not only saving the Laurin (the Elf-King) from a palace coup but having to help him literally restructure his entire world and race. The alternative is the destruction of Alfheim by the other worlds, contaminated by leakage from a reality (our own) where genocide is a political tool. And if that is allowed to happen, says the Laurin, "everyone in all the Worlds, everywhere" will die too.

Though the spine label describes it as fantasy, "Roses" reads more to me like sf; Elves in her Alfheim use blasters, hold jobs like humans (often even in the human worlds), and don't seem vulnerable to "cold iron," and even the Laurin's ability to "worldmaster"--anything from controlling the weather to literally summoning back the prehistoric ocean to destroy his enemies--is described by him as "how kingship works here...Those of us who could understand the World well enough to make the weather do what the crops needed, lived to breed descendants who could make it do that even better" (in other words, evolution at work), and is apparently as much a psychic process as Lee's Sight. Lee's version of Earth, particularly, is sketched with dozens of bits of techie throwaway so casually inserted into the stream of the story that the reader scarcely notices them--which, of course, is the best way to build a world: make it seem natural.

Lee, Gelert, and the Laurin eventually do triumph over the conspiracy and the leaking contagion, averting transdimensional war (you'll have to read the book to find out how), and in the end all the worlds (perhaps even ours) are changed in many profound ways. And here we see that this reality, though it's science-fictional, may well be a part of the same one that the Young Wizards inhabit, and that Lee may have unwittingly served as the tool of the Powers That Be. The slightly abrupt ending leaves room for more explication of the changes she and the Laurin have effected, and I sincerely hope that Duane goes on to write more in Lee's Universe.