Enterprise of Death

Jesse Bullington

Orbit (2011)

ISBN: 9780316087346

Reviewed by Ben Julien

This is the story of a young servant girl, Awa, who is captured by an ancient necromancer, and is then unwittingly and unhappily apprenticed to him. She learns the dark arts of raising and manipulating the dead and is drawn into the machinations of the necromancer and his bid to continue possessing new bodies.

Awa eventually escapes his clutches and the story shifts to her misadventures in a dark, continental Europe. The other two main protagonists, Niklaus and Monique, are introduced and their combined stories initially focus on questions of how to survive, and to some extent fit in, with Awa, a non-Christian, dark-skinned woman in a superstitious world ruled by the sword and a predatory Church.