With “The Black Prism” ($7.99, Orbit), Brent Weeks delivers
a tale that will have some familiarity, but a very different tone for fans of
his Night Angel trilogy.
Weeks introduces us to Gavin Guile, The Prism, which
basically means that he’s the most powerful magic user in the world, an emperor
by title, though not necessarily in the traditional sense.
Guile knows exactly how much time he has left to live.
Prisms tend to rule in multiples of seven years, and he’s working on his third
set of seven, an unusual length of time. He has great purposes planned out for
the things that he’ll achieve, but his life is thrown into chaos when he learns
that he has a bastard son in a backwater satrapy that has been neglected since
he battled his brother Dazen there in the Prism’s War.