Lindsay Buroker - Forgotten Ages #1-#2

Author: Lindsay Buroker

Title: Encrypted, Enigma, Decrypted (Forgotten Ages #1-#2)

Language: English

Format: ebook

Rating: 4 stars

No of pages: 350+48+361

Reading challenge: A book with a title that begins with the letter "e"

Read: 23.06-25.06.2018

Goodreads

BLURB:

Professor Tikaya Komitopis isn’t a great beauty, a fearless warrior, or even someone who can walk and chew chicle at the same time, but her cryptography skills earn her wartime notoriety. When enemy marines show up at her family’s plantation, she expects the worst. 

But they’re not there to kill her. They need her to decode mysterious runes, and they ask for help in the manner typical of a conquering empire: they kidnap her, threaten her family, and throw her in the brig of their fastest steamship. 

Her only ally is a fellow prisoner who charms her with a passion for academics as great as her own. Together, they must decipher mind-altering alchemical artifacts, deadly poison rockets, and malevolent technological constructs, all while dodging assassination attempts from a rival power determined the expedition should fail. As if the situation weren’t treacherous enough, this new “ally” may turn out to be the last person Tikaya should trust. Those runes cloak more than mysteries, however, and he’s the only one who can help her unravel them before their secrets destroy the world. 

There's something about Lindsay Buroker's writing that makes me want to read all of her backlist, or at the very least the entire series at a time once I dive into her books. This series, that I had not read before, was no exception. 

It's actually one of the shorter works Buroker has written (at least as far as I know), even though connected with The Emperor's Edge series as some of the characters were already familiar to me. Especially one particular assassin whom I've grown to love more every time I read these books. Well, yes, both of the protagonists are familiar from The Emperor's Edge as well, but they were not that memorable to me when I first read The Emperor's Edge so that I could remember the basic stuff but not the details about the soon-to-be couple Tikaya and Rias.

As with each and every Buroker novel, it's packed full of action and witty dialogue that's guaranteed to keep you glued to your Kindle for hours at a time. Well, at least it worked that way for me.

And guess who has been reading The Emperor's Edge all over again? Yep... that would be me. These books simply made me miss all those characters and want to dive back into the world of Amaranthe and Sicarius. While I really, really liked how Tikaya and Rias grew closer, I still prefer Amaranthe and Sicarius as their relationship felt slower to me, and I'm just a sucker like that who likes her romance stories to be excruciatingly slow. :)