published 1996; hardback 1996, Ace

It hurts to watch icons topple. Katherine Kurtz and Deborah Turner Harris have crafted an excellent series about a magical Adept, his student, and his Hunting Lodge of like-minded associates, who help to maintain esoteric order in present-day Scotland. Death of an Adept lacks the grace and charm of its predecessors in this series. Its authors have allowed their villain to get out of hand, letting his intelligence disintegrate even faster than one might expect from an overstressed Black Adept. Worse, they have chosen to engage the sympathy of the reader by having him perform actions which are at best improbable and at worst an irresponsible and unnecessary goad toward hysteria. I am terribly disappointed with this novel, especially as I had anxiously awaited its arrival.

This book gives us the climactic battle between Sir Adam Sinclair of the Hunting Lodge and Francis Raeburn of the nefarious Lodge of the Lynx, who have been tussling for several months in four previous novels. Raeburn’s ineffectual superiors have all been destroyed or banished by Sinclair’s Lodge, leaving Raeburn’s path clear as he attempts to invest a prehistoric dagger with heretofore unimagined powers. He takes advantage of Sinclair’s prolonged absence from Scotland to do this, but is thwarted by Hunting Lodge members as well as troubles of his own making, which delay him until Sinclair’s return.

Remarkably little has stopped Raeburn in his quest for magical power. He has cooperated with Nazis, aided Tibetan Black Adepts, and committed various thefts, murders, and desecration, all in the spirit of self-empowerment. In fact, he and his coterie of underlings all wear blood-red carnelian signet rings that symbolize their intent as well as provide a convenient marking device for the reader, who might be unable to recognize a villain at first glance. Red in cabbalistic theory stands for the power of Might; Sinclair and his group wear blue sapphire, which is symbolic of Mercy.

Raeburn, obviously, is a bad guy. He has dedicated his service to the Celtic deity Taranis, who behaves as an evil and wretchedly spoiled deity ought, dispensing power to Raeburn as he proves successful. At times Raeburn seems obsessed with his deity; at other times he seems detached enough to consider abandoning Taranis for whatever evil force will bring him more power or a better artifact. He is as dedicated as a Black Adept can be. Of course, this means that Raeburn is concerned with serving himself first, and the dark second. Up till now he has gone about this in an intelligent manner.

This isn’t enough. Razor intelligence, sardonic humor and a willingness to abandon not only situation but subordinates no longer suffice. To fully satisfy the demands of this nonsensical plot, Raeburn becomes (gasp!) a full-fledged Satanist. Ah, the Satanist, beloved of so many organizations both occult and rabidly anti-occult. True Satanists are so very rare. So many dispense nowadays with the tediousness of high anti-church ritual and get right down to illicit drugs, grotesque murders and even worse sex. So few bother with the time-honored traditions of the Left Hand Path, but thankfully these authors have rescued this worthy practice from the rubbish-heap of centuries. Pity that such a decorative digression can’t be made to fit the plot.

One of the salient points of the Adept series up till now is that magic, like knowledge or any other kind of power, is in essence value-neutral. It is the use of such power in an irresponsible, self- serving manner that is evil. Would that these authors had taken their own words to heart. Another recurrent theme in these novels is the constant complaint by characters, both good and otherwise, about popular hysteria, egged on by the media, which hampers their work. Ahem.

The Black Mass sequence is unnecessary. Raeburn, who up till now has shown almost clinical detachment from such emotions as jealousy and loyalty, appears to seize on the concept of such a ritual almost gleefully, all for the chance of humiliating Sinclair and destroying Sinclair’s magical power.

Raeburn appears not to notice or remember that his own deity, as befits a powerful, ancient, nasty deity, is very likely jealous of and in direct competition with the various Evils that the Black Mass invokes. Bad deities, like Black Adepts, feed off each other, leaving few who are weak, foolish, or magically incompetent. So Raeburn runs a very real risk when he chooses to mix magical metaphors, though the point is never addressed.

Finally, the whole concept of using the Black Mass to subdue and enslave a White Adept strikes me as chancy at best. Raeburn hopes to nullify Sinclair’s magical power while leaving Sinclair’s physical body unblemished, and it’s clear that he hopes to do this by pouring Evil into him. Though Raeburn’s a thrill-seeker, he isn’t stupid. What did he think to accomplish? The Black Mass is a ritual designed either to encourage pure Evil to transubstantiate a foul icky mess, or to make a mockery of the Christian Mass in which wine and bread actually become the body and blood of Christ and therefore a potent power of Good. If nothing else, the mockery is achieved; however, it seems clear that Raeburn actually wants to encourage his chalice of ickiness to transubstantiate into a potent power of Evil.

The key word here is encourage. The authors let Sinclair off the hook by allowing him to ruminate over the process of transubstantiation itself, which unlike many other forms of magical activity occurs not at the will of the priest who calls, but at the will of the spirit called. Good deities, like good dogs, come when you call. Evil deities feel no such compulsion. So a Black Mass, as difficult as it is to stage--- where does one find a defrocked priest who can read backwards Latin?-- might have no magical effect whatever, no matter the skill of its participants.

All this work and for what? The chance to feed a gob of tainted Power to a White Adept. Pretty foolish for Raeburn, who should have tasted the cup himself. What if he managed to taint Sinclair not partially but completely? Wouldn’t the much more learned and powerful Sinclair immediately attack? Or Sinclair could, as he did in a previous novel, cleanse the Evil from such power and either turn it loose or out of desperate necessity claim it for his own use. Ouch.

I could go on, but it seems to me that Raeburn’s attempt to desecrate a White Adept is merely an attempt to shore up a sagging plotline by adding a horrific prologue to the ritual that Raeburn performs to summon up an Even Worse Black Adept. And pardon me, but I do not feel that yanking readers around by the visceral short hairs of emotion is the best way to render a book exciting. This book, while not up to the spine-tingling suspense of the second or third books in this series, could have done very well without the Black Mass sequence. Particularly good were the scenes in which the Peregrine, newest member of the Hunting Lodge, explains to his preternaturally understanding new bride about his duty to the Service to the Light. Sinclair’s compassion toward his father-in-law is beautifully done, as is the new mentoring relationship between the crusty McLeod and his new student.

Without the Black Mass sequence, I would have enjoyed this book, though not so much as the warm and sympathetic first book, The Adept or the more exciting books which follow, The Lodge of the Lynx and Templar Treasure. I particularly enjoyed the second novel, which reintroduced a character from Kurtz’ occult thriller Lammas Night, set in wartime Britain. Dagger Magic, the fourth novel, encompassed a vast amount of research and even while improbable was wholly engrossing. Unfortunately the tolerance shown toward those who serve the Light in different ways, championed by these authors in other novels, is missing from this volume and is replaced by a constant, insidious disparagement. This is wearying.

Review by Becky Parkhurst
Reviewed February 2, 1997

ISBN 0-441-00367-2

See other reviews of Death of an Adept at Amazon.com