Description:
It's no surprise that Tanith Lee has won the August Derleth Award and several World Fantasy Awards. She writes elegantly of love and lust, hatred and obsession, in decadent, morally ambiguous, fascinating novels and short stories that owe more to Angela Carter and Oscar Wilde than to any established tradition of fantasy. Lee finds the perfect setting for her rich style and dark visions in Venus, an alternate-history, 18th-century Venice caught up in a fevered Carnival that requires everyone to either wear masks or be killed. When Furian Furiano, searching for bodies in the canals, finds instead a floating mask of Apollo, he becomes entangled in the complex plots and counterplots of warring religions and the secret societies of powerful guilds. And he encounters the beautiful Eurydiche, who has been cursed from birth with silence and an immobile face that make her both a powerful symbol of the historic role of women and an irresistible, inscrutable, and possibly fatal attraction for the hot-blooded young Furian. This fantasy murder mystery, Faces Under Water, is Book I of the Secret Books of Venus, but its plot is self-contained and complete. This is no fat fantasy; rather, it is a properly proportioned novel of somewhat more than 200 pages, a length that displays Tanith Lee's considerable gift at its finest. --Cynthia Ward
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