Wizard Squared (Rogue Agent book 3) by K.E. Mills (book review).
‘Wizard Squared’ is the third instalment in K.E. Mills’ ‘Rogue Agent’ series, featuring the extremely powerful wizard Gerald. Here we are shown an alternative view of what might have happened to Gerald and his friends had he taken a slightly different path to defeating Lional in the events of the first book in this series, ‘The Accidental Sorcerer’.
When Monk Markham opens the door one day to find himself standing there, he is understandably confused. The other Monk has endured hardships and torture at the hands of an evil wizard, none other than Gerald! This Monk and his Gerald are from a parallel universe, but the only way to defeat one rogue wizard is with the help of another, which is where ‘our’ Gerald comes in. Breaking magical frontiers to try and save two worlds, Monk and Gerald must bluff as they’ve never bluffed before. Only with a little help from Sir Alec and a great deal of luck, can they hope to defeat the evil Gerald and, even working at their best, the casualties may just be too high to live with…
I have enjoyed this series so far and started ‘Wizard Squared’ with fairly high hopes for an entertaining read. The writing style was as engaging as always and I have no complaints about the characters. It was quite interesting to see how Mills had developed the parallel universe versions of characters that are by now quite familiar to us. I get the feeling that she had fun writing this and being able to play around with characters in this way must be brilliant.
However, I felt a bit let down by the plot. There is an awful lot of repetition of events from earlier books in this series, particularly book one, ‘The Accidental Sorcerer’. It took 34 pages for any deviations from the first book, which may not sound a lot, but which was already tedious by that point. After that came a great deal of what I can only describe as filler – the characters played around with some incantations and evil Gerald did some things to make himself more evil. Not until page 225 do we actually get the parallel world cross-over promised in the first sentence of the blurb on the back of the book. Things move fairly rapidly towards a conclusion from there, but still without much actually happening.
I still enjoyed reading this, because I get on very well with Mills’ writing style. It’s very approachable, draws you right in to her world and flows very smoothly from page to page. Yet, throughout it all, I really did feel cheated. It seemed like a bit of a cop-out and it makes me sad to have to write this after enjoying the first two books and really loving some of Mills’ work published as Karen Miller but it is the truth.
I like the setting, I like the characters, but this time the plot let the book down. I believe there is at least one further book in this series and I can only hope that it shows a return to form for Mills after this disappointing instalment.
Vinca Russell
May 2014
(pub: Orbit. 529 page paperback. Price: £ 6.99 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-84149-729-7)
check out website: www.orbitbooks.net
