Cobweb Empire - Vera Nazarian (Cobweb Bride #2)

Several years ago, I read the first book in this trilogy, Cobweb Bride.  The story revolved around several fictional European kingdoms and a world where death suddenly stopped occurring, with horrible consequences--and Death himself will not set the world aright until he is brought his "Cobweb Bride."  Persephone "Percy" Ayren sets out in hopes of either being the Cobweb Bride or finding her so that she can help her grandmother, who is trapped on the verge of death but is unable to die.  With many adventures and various kingdoms in political upheaval along the way, Percy finally finds her way to Death's keep and learns that she is not the Cobweb Bride--but Death makes her his Champion and sends her out to find the Bride in the world beyond.

This book picks up shortly after the end of the first, with Percy and her traveling companions, including the Black Knight, aka Beltain of Chidair, who Percy inadvertently kidnapped when she whopped him over the head with a skillet when he and his men tried to stop her from reaching Death's Keep.  But now they're traveling in easy companionship, more or less, and dropping off the other girls that Percy fell in with along the way.  Upon arrival at Percy's hometown, they find out what her being Death's Champion really means--it means that she is the only one who is able to put the dead truly to rest when death itself seems to have stopped.  With that newfound knowledge, Percy continues south, in search of the Cobweb Bride.  Meanwhile, we encounter the mysterious Sovereign of the Domain, the lands south of the Realm, which is actually composed of a bunch of realms, I guess?  The political entanglements and geography here are kind of confusing.  But in any case, this Sovereign is up to no good, and is clearly planning on starting a war and it seems might be immortal.  Whaaaat?  And then there's a few other minor story lines floating about as well, dealing with imprisoned nobles and spies and so on.  And numerous little scenes that don't have anything to do with the central characters or plot but seem to serve only to illustrate things that we've already learned about in the main narrative.

This is the second book in a trilogy, which means that it is The Walking Book.  This is the volume of a trilogy in which the main characters mostly spend a lot of time walking from place to place, in pursuit of a plot that won't really pick up until the third book.  And indeed, Percy and Beltain do a lot of walking--and more precisely, a lot of riding while avoiding looking at each other.  The Sovereign spends a lot of time listening to reports and scheming.  The imprisoned nobles spend a lot of time pining for freedom and then a bit more interesting time escaping, though it doesn't really get them anywhere in the end.  But ultimately, the growing attraction between Percy and Beltain, while painfully awkward and stilted, was the most interesting part of this book, and it's not really a riveting romance and is resolved quite quickly with brash declarations of "I love you!" after a flurry of kisses.  Meh.

Additionally, this book has some editing problems.  There are words that are misspelled, missing, or very occasionally misused.  And then there are the commas--something that Nazarian doesn't seem to know how to use, being as they're sprinkled about.  The commas and the ellipses!  It briefly occurred to me to count the number of times Nazarian ended a sentence with an ellipsis, but I quickly found that the endeavor would be futile, because there are just so many of them; and this is coming from someone who really likes the ellipsis as a punctuation mark.

Overall, I wasn't terribly impressed with this.  I might continue on with the third book, but at this point I'm unsure.  The plot seems to be getting far-fetched instead of fantastical, and the constant sidetracking from the main plot to talk about this vanished field or that island got old quickly.  And logic seems to be going missing along with proper pacing; why would an immortal being have a death shadow, after all, if immortals can (obviously) never die?  Hm...  We'll see.

2.5 stars out of 5.