The Starless Crown (Moon Fall, #1)

by James Rollins

An alliance embarks on a dangerous journey to uncover the secrets of the distant past and save their world in this captivating, deeply visionary adventure from #1 New York Times bestselling thriller-master James Rollins.

A gifted student foretells an apocalypse. Her reward is a sentence of death.

Fleeing into the unknown, she is drawn into a team of outcasts:

A broken soldier, who once again takes up the weapons he's forbidden to wield and carves a trail back home.

A drunken prince, who steps out from his beloved brother's shadow and claims a purpose of his own.

An imprisoned thief, who escapes the crushing dark and discovers a gleaming artifact-one that will ignite a power struggle across the globe.

On the run, hunted by enemies old and new, they must learn to trust each other in order to survive in a world evolved in strange, beautiful, and deadly ways, and uncover ancient secrets that hold the key to their salvation.

But with each passing moment, doom draws closer.

WHO WILL CLAIM THE STARLESS CROWN?

• ISBN10: 1250816777
• ISBN13: 9781250816771
• Publish Date: 4 January 2022
• Publish Status: Active
• Out of Print: 5 April 2024
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: St Martin's Press
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 560
• Language: English
• URL: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250816771/the-starless-crown

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally posted on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

The Starless Crown is the first book in a new high fantasy series by James Rollins. Released 4th Jan 2022 by Macmillan, it's 560 pages and is available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats.

This is a very well written epic adventure featuring a group of misfits from wildly disparate backgrounds, thrust together in a desperate attempt to prevent the destruction of their world and all life on it. It's full of complex magic and a well built up background system and peopled by genuinely three dimensional characters who live and breathe. Rollins is a masterful writer and having turned his pen back to writing fantasy (he discusses this in the introductory author's foreword) it's apparent that he still has a flair with the genre.

This is a *dense* novel. It's got a lot of gravitas. Although there is a lot of action (and pathos, and some humor along the way), it reads like what it is: a deeply written first volume in an epic high fantasy series. It moves slowly and comprehensively, building up layer by layer. There are foreshadowings and doom-laden nightmares aplenty, evil cultish magician necro-priests, ancient artifacts, prophecies, a magical blind foundling baby, and all the good ingredients one would expect from solid "doorstop" fantasies.

Sensitive readers should be aware that there are some quite graphic depictions of violence and murder. The evil necro-priest cultists especially are quite evil and necro-ish. There's a death early on in the book which was quite explicit and made me briefly consider whether I should continue or not, but I'm glad I did.

This one will likely be a great fit for fans of Brandon Sanderson and Patrick Rothfuss. It's absolutely not derivative, there are a lot of fascinating and worthy originalities which I'm quite looking forward to exploring, but it does definitely have the same sense of scope and endless horizons which both of the aforementioned authors are well known for.

The unabridged audiobook version has a run-time of 22 hours and 5 minutes and is capably narrated by Nicola Barber, with an appearance by the author himself. The sound and recording quality and production values are high throughout.

Four stars. I'm looking forward to finding out what comes next.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

[Jeff Sexton]

Solid Storytelling. Nearly Deceptive Description. Let me be explicitly clear: THIS IS A FANTASY BOOK. It is NOT a Sigma Force style science-bending military technothriller. Given Rollins' rise to fame on the back of his Sigma Force books, as well as the fact that he has *another* pseudonym for his pre-Sigma Force fantasy novels, the fact that the description of this book does not make clear that THIS IS A FANTASY BOOK is dang near deceptive marketing. If you enjoy fantasy tales, this one is going to be perfectly in line with what you enjoy and more power to you. But despite having a *far* wider range in my own reading than most readers, fantasy books are one of *few* genres that just make for dang good naps every time I try to read them - and this one was no different, despite LOVING Rollins' Sigma Force work and at times reading it in a single sitting. This noted, Rollins' abilities to craft a tale are just as strong here, and for what it is the story is compelling. Truly my only complaint is that it should have been made explicitly clear that THIS IS A FANTASY BOOK, and I would never have touched it at all. Recommended.