Genre: Fantasy, Legal Thriller, Romance
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay, Bi
Reviewer: Scott
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About The Book
Is love worth destroying his reputation?
Ten years ago, the theft of his codex destroyed Talio Rossa’s career as a magistrate in the four cities. But when his ex-wife—finally willing to forgive finding him in bed with a man—presents him a long-shot legal case, he has the chance to get his career back on track.
While fighting to rejoin the legal community, Talio uncovers a conspiracy so big it threatens the origins of the four cities themselves. Their prosperity is only thanks to their connection by magical floating waterways and the brilliance of their legal system, now regarded as near scripture.
To save his career, Talio must work with both the one who doomed his marriage and the hooded, heretical man who sets his heart aflame but is determined to plead guilty to a murder he didn’t commit. To stand a chance of winning the case, saving his career and the man of his dreams, Talio will have to uncover an explosive secret destined to blow the legal system apart.
Trigger Warnings: Angst (intense emotional scenes) • Discrimination (religious and sexual orientation/gender) • Dubious consent • Explicit sex scenes • Infidelity • Murder (not onscreen, but there’s a homicide trial) • Cultural/Religious conflict • Social stigma (facial scarring) • Suicide (mention) • Substance use (alcohol, alcoholism) • Violence (two brief attempts on one character’s life) • That said, there’s a happy ending – promise!
The Review
Just finished a fascinating new fantasy by a very promising author. Talio’s Codex was a first for me – a legal fantasy. That is, a legal thriller set in a fantasy world.
It starts with Talio Rossa, a merintie scavenger in a world that went through a traumatic war fifty years before the opening of the story. Merinite is a magical substance that can create water out of thin air, and is used to power the skyways – the rivers of water that fly through the sky to connect the four cities above the Impassable Forest, the devastated center of the old kingdom that’s now basically a preserve for monsters.
The sudden arrival of his ex-wife, Gawani – whom he’d last seen when she caught him with another man – sets off a series of events that leads him back to the capital city, Nuciferia. Talio was a magistrate there – basically a judge – before the scandal and his loss of his codex cost him his job and his reputation.
Now he has an unexpected chance at redemption – if he can bring himself to defend an Incarnite named Pazli – a member of a strange new sect who keep themselves constantly covered in cloaks and show only their hands, and who – unlike most Nuciferians who worship the water goddess Felle, instead follow the god of fire, Sif.
And when he runs into the man who ruined his life, Talio is forced to confront many things about himself – and his society – that are deeply disturbing.
Cohen sets up a fascinating world here. While sometimes light on descriptive details, Nuciferian society is fascinating. There are deep crosscurrents at work here dealing with human identity, religion, dignity and true belief. Talio has to navigate his own biases and desires, a shadowy conspiracy that disgraced him once and seems determined to do so again, and a culture that’s so unlike his own that it initially makes him shrink back in disgust.
All the while, he’s balanced between two men – Cale Faro, the still-handsome man and now prosecutor who ruined his life, and Pazli Mecomb, the mysterious and very closeted Incarnite who draws him in like a moth to a flame. And in the background, a mystery arises to be solved around the still-young legal system for the Four Cities.
I loved the cases Talio takes on, and what they illuminated about his society. The young legal system still hasn’t grappled with patent law and the theft of ideas, and a good chunk of the book also deals with a case about non-binary identity and some of the many reasons people choose to put on the Incarnite cloak.
My one (very small) beef with this story? It follows the recent trend of using a single narrator – in third person, this time. Mostly this is not an issue, but there were a few times when events had to be relayed to Talio that I wish I had been able to see through a primary character.
Talio’s character arc is masterfully done, as he starts to reclaim his life and it takes him in unexpected directions and challenges some of his most deeply-held beliefs, and the few sex scenes, though not overly graphic, are deeply intimate, moving, and integral to the plot.
This is a well-written, fast-paced legal fantasy thriller with unexpected twists and turns that passes one of my most important tests for a great story – it’s unlike anything I have ever read before. Highly recommended.
The Reviewer
Scott is the founder of Queer Sci Fi, and a fantasy and sci fi writer in his own right, with more than 30 published short stories, novellas and novels to his credit, including two trilogies.