Death Mask: A Tale of Vengeance by Nora DelzelleMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
A well-crafted sci-fi fantasy...
Forty-some years ago my uncle gave me a science fiction anthology. It was a thick red hardback that I read from cover to cover. It inspired a lifelong love of the genre. The stories in that book made me think outside the box. They filled me with awe for the imagination it took to write them. That book still remains in my collection today. The title is OMNIBUS OF SCIENCE FICTION, edited by Groff Conklin, a well-known and prolific editor of the genre. It was published in 1952, the Golden Age of Science Fiction. It’s a substantial volume, 562 pages, with 43 stories divided into sections relating to a common theme. Some stories are fun, some are thought-provoking, and some are adventurous. I love them all.
Death Mask: A Tale of Vengeance by Nora Delzelle is a wonderfully written and richly descriptive novel with brilliantly drawn settings and characters. The author weaves a well-crafted sci-fi fantasy that will captivate the reader’s attention from the start. Skillfully constructed, this exciting and thrilling sci-fi will have you turning the pages from beginning to end. There’s also plenty of imagery in the writing style that makes you feel you are right there in the story, and that’s something I look for in a good book.
The plot is intricately carved, as the synopsis suggests: ‘Ghosts, gods, and cursed relics are at the heart of this thrilling debut by Nora Delzelle. Death Mask is a modern re-imagining of the battles between Horus and Set, ancient Egyptian deities that represent order and chaos. It is a story about a young woman, Alex Kincaid, who gets caught in their deadly feud by placing a bid on an eBay auction for a golden mask. This relic confers protection and ageless power to the owner. Alex has to contend with angry gods, prophetic dreams, and ghostly guides imparting knowledge to discover that the ancients still walk among us. If Alex can survive, there is a steep price for her new-found power... her very soul.’
I enjoyed the story, character development, and dialogue. There were plenty of plot twists that I didn’t see coming and that added to the book’s mystique. When I stopped reading to work, I found myself wondering what happened in the book, and replaying parts of the novel in my head to see if I could figure more out. It's a solid read that benefits substantially from a raft of better-than-average elements. Highly recommended.
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