Masters of Death hooked me with its very exciting synopsis: Viola is a vampire real estate agent trying to sell a haunted house. Tom, the ghost haunting the house, doesn’t want the house to sell so he scares away any potential buyers. So Viola enlists the help of a medium named Fox, who is a fraudulent medium but the real godson of Death, to help her rid the ghost from the house. However, Death has recently gone missing and the aforementioned characters must play a dangerous game to find Death and return him to the world. This mysterious game is one that only the immortals play and there is only one rule: don’t lose.
That sounds incredible, right??
Well, I found the story to be more convoluted than necessary at times and also longer than it should have been. The book really feels like a mashup of two separate plots: one where Viola is trying to sell the house, and one where the characters are playing the game. I didn’t enjoy reading anything about the game because it honestly made no sense to me. I still have no idea what the game is. The characters alluded to gambling, battling immortals, or actually having nothing to physically lose in order to win. But it is still quite unclear to me exactly what this dangerous game entails, which is why reading about it wasn’t enjoyable for me because I just felt lost.
I did enjoy the plot surrounding the house, which was more present at the beginning of the book, and I did like the characters. Olivie Blake is skilled at crafting fleshed out and likable characters in each of her novels and this one was no different.
I think Masters of Death is a novel that I will need to reread to fully grasp the whole story. I’m a little conflicted about my rating because there were parts that I really enjoyed but also parts that I didn’t enjoy at all. I definitely liked it better than Blake’s One for My Enemy, but I enjoyed The Atlas Six and Alone with You in the Ether more. Her books are really hit or miss for me and I can’t pinpoint why.
Overall, I would recommend this book if you think it sounds interesting to you with the caveat that there is a lot more going on in the story than the synopsis initially alludes to and you have to pay close attention to understand it all.
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