Semi-Finalist Review: The Woeling Lass by Dave Dobson [SPFBO]

Finally! Our fourth semi-finalist review! With Meg Cowley’s Flight of Sorcery and Shadow, Travis M. Riddle’s On Lavender Tides, and Abbie Evan’s Mysterious Ways all locked in a three-way tie so far (all with scores of 7.5!), it’s about time we had some answers. Who is going to be The Fantasy Inn’s finalist this year? Well… You can read on to find out.

To (one last time) reiterate some of our boilerplate text… we have posted these semi finalist reviews in no particular order, and each of them feature multiple (sometimes opposing) opinions from our judges. Rather than requiring a mandatory review from each judge, however, our readers had the option to opt-out of providing any text if they felt like all of their opinions had been touched on. We figure that this saves you from reading the same stuff a whole bunch of times! Please keep in mind that the nature of the competition means that there will be a fair bit of critique present in these reviews — we have discussed the merits of each book a lot at this stage — but we hope that we have kept this fair and balanced, and it of course only reflects our own opinions.

With all of that out of the way… Let’s hear about The Woeling Lass, and figure out who our finalist is!

The Blurb

An assassin hunts Inspector Gueran Declais through the streets of Frosthelm, and she is not acting alone. Just as he learns that his family may have been attacked and slain, Gueran is struck down as well. Despite the odds, he lives. Barely. Whisked away from the city for his safety, he struggles to recover from his injuries, learn his family’s fate, and uncover the identity of those who want him dead. Far from Frosthelm, he becomes caught up in investigating another bloody attack, one that may or may not have been perpetrated by vengeful spirit of a woman wronged long ago, and one that threatens to expose him to his enemies. The locals are certain, though: the killer had to be the Woeling Lass, her hands cold as the grave and her feet aflame.

Back in Frosthelm, Urret Milton is an apprentice in some difficulty at the Guild. She receives a mysterious note for Gueran, a man everyone thinks is dead. Rapidly embroiled in the effort to unravel the reason for the killings and bring the assassins to justice, Urret struggles to shed her troubles and show that she has what it takes to be an inspector. But all this leads her into far more peril than she bargained for, for which she can’t possibly be ready. Her position at the Guild, the security of the city, and her life itself are all at stake.

This tale from the Inquisitors’ Guild of Frosthelm is a fresh mystery full of swordplay, deceit, ancient magic, scheming nobles, and a healthy dose of humor. Combining the clues and hidden mysteries of detective stories with all the grand adventure of epic fantasy, The Woeling Lass is a wondrous journey through betrayal, murder, ancient legend, loss, courage, and redemption. And, it has really silly chapter titles.

Each book from the Inquisitors’ Guild series is a stand-alone mystery and a complete story.

Calvin’s Thoughts:

The Woeling Lass by Dave Dobson is one part detective story, one part court intrigue, and one part epic fantasy. The story is set in Dobson’s Inquisitor’s Guild universe, but while there are some references to earlier stories, I’ve never read any of the other books set in this universe and didn’t have any trouble following along. I believe this book deals with new characters. In any case, there’s a fun mystery angle to this story and figuring out the mystery is what kept me turning the pages. 

Aside from the mystery angle, I felt Dobson did a good job fleshing out characters. Each of the two viewpoint characters have a unique voice — aided by one of them being third person and one first — and motivations. The characters acted in keeping with those motivations, even when that meant they didn’t necessarily make the wisest choices. There is also a sense of realism to the world. By this I don’t mean that the world is brutal or dark, but that the world feels lived in. It feels like there is a history, that while we’re reading a particular story about particular people there are other things going on in this world, other people living their lives. I quite like it when a world is fleshed out enough to have that feel, and that is certainly the case with Woeling Lass. There are also hints of cool magic and a deeper history to the world. The prose is clean and well-written, if somewhat formal at times. The fight scenes were engaging. The detective aspects of the story are interesting and do a good job of moving the story along in a way that kept me engaged. I felt the novel was well-paced, aside from a second toward the end. 

Actually, that brings me to some things that didn’t connect with me quite as well. Toward the end of the novel, some of the mystery aspects felt like they fell into place a little too conveniently. I don’t want to say too much about that because I don’t want to spoil anything, but I would have liked a little more foreshadowing of some of the elements that end up playing an important role in the ending. I also felt like the two viewpoints could have interacted earlier, as they two do feel rather disconnected for much of the book. There are also occasionally some small continuity errors that jumped out at me. For instance, we might have a character calling a character they just met by a nickname, when they haven’t learned that nickname yet. Perhaps a scene got moved in the editing process and such an error slipped through, but it ended up causing me a few minutes of flipping back around through pages to see if I had missed an earlier meeting. 

This felt like the most complete book out of my batch, and so it was an easy decision to put it forward to the other judges. 

Oh! And one last thing, the chapter titles in this one are a study in well-crafted puns. 

Adam’s Thoughts:

I don’t have too much more to add that Calvin hasn’t already covered – we were pretty much in lock-step with our thoughts on this book! I think the characters were pretty well rounded in a way that elevated the story, and for that reason and the reasons above, The Woeling Lass was one of my favourite of the books put forward in this phase of judging.

One negative worth mentioning is that some important events occur while neither POV characters are around to witness them, and the ensuing sequence of explanation felt very passive compared to the rest of the book. But I did enjoy this book a lot and plan to read more of the series at some point.

Hiu’s Thoughts:

Let’s start off by saying that Woeling Lass was quite easily my second favourite book from this year’s Phase 1. Along the same lines as what Calvin said, I think this was also probably the most “complete” book in the Inn’s batch. It’s a great all-rounder — definitely more plot-focused than on character or world, but the two POV characters have distinct personalities that make it easy to slip into their heads and engage with the story. The setting, too, has a bit of depth to it, but I do have some small critiques there (that I’ll get to shortly).

I thought that both the story and the mystery were a hell of a lot of fun. I love this kind of gradually-unfolding conspiracy, and while I absolutely agree that there are some aspects to it that I wish were introduced/foreshadowed earlier in the book (some of the reveals feel more Kool-Aid man than Poirot), that didn’t have a huge influence on how much I enjoyed this one. 

Woeling Lass has a very readable form of prose that meant I devoured this over the course of two days. I think my updates in the Inn’s Discord chat consisted of “Hey I’m 30% through” and “Hey I’m finished”. There was one quirk I noted, however, that may be a YMMV affair for some readers, and that concerns how Dobson sets up a scene. Often, there is very very little visual description of the surroundings. A few sentences or a short paragraph at most. The book relies on dialogue and character interaction to breeze past this, which personally isn’t something that I mind too much (especially because I enjoyed both of those things), but I know this lack of description may be a turn-off for some readers.

Additionally, while I’ve praised the depth of the world in this book, that should come with a caveat. There is certainly a lived-in feeling, but the world does feel a bit like a setting-in-a-bottle. I never really got a sense of a world that existed beyond the places and events of the story. Which is hardly a major criticism, but it’s just a little thing that impacts immersion.

All in all, though, Woeling Lass is a book that I’d heartily recommend to anyone intrigued by the premise. It’s a little vanilla in places, sure, but hey sometimes vanilla is delicious. I do think the book suffers from some rough patches in the middle and near the end, but for the most part it has an incredible momentum to it that kept me glued to the pages. It isn’t hard to see why Woeling Lass is such a strong contender for our finalist spot.

Devin’s Thoughts:

As the fourth reader in this line-up there’s little to be said that hasn’t been said so I’ll keep my comments brief. I really enjoyed this book, the mystery is beautifully set up with immediate immersion, even though, as others have noted, the solving of it requires a lot of knowledge the reader doesn’t have access to — something that can be frustrating in mysteries for some readers. What I most loved about this book, however, was the asshole main protagonist, who goes from straight-up selfish and entitled dick with biting humour to self-aware, still somewhat entitled noble still with biting humour, and throughout that time is never unsympathetic. I could happily have read an entire book with just him being a dick and had as much fun.

Conclusions

There’s that, then! All of our four semi-finalists reviewed, and all of them fun books that you should definitely check out. But! Who is our finalist? Well… for our semi-finalist reading process, we had five readers read each of the books and provide a score, which was then averaged out to give a final score.

Doing this with an odd-number of judges means that we can avoid complicated ties (after the disaster we had in actually picking our semi-finalists in the first place). Look, from a reading perspective, having a group of death is great fun. So many good books! From a judging perspective… not so much. Anyway, bearing in mind that our other three semi-finalists are all sitting on 7.5, Woeling Lass comes in with a final score of…