A steampunk fantasy set in Edinburgh in 1844 this exciting novel begins with eighteen-year-old Lady Aileana at a ball hoping it will be as boring as it seems and trying to ignore the gossip about her over her mother's death a year ago where she found the body. Since she has been found disheveled and with blood on her clothing at other balls. It seems that she is hunting fairies or sithichean as they prefer to be called. A faery killed her mother by taking her heart out and she plans on hunting down and killing her. She has been trained by a rogue fairy named Kiaran to fight them. With a bit of seilgffiur about her neck, she is able to see them. Also with it she is able to kill them. Her weapons like her gun contain bullets with it in it. But Aileana is also an inventor and she creates various devices to use such as a tiny bomb. Kiaran isn't the only fairy she has helping her. There is also Derrick a pixie who repairs her dresses and lives in her wardrobe in exchange for a spot of honey a day. He also provides her with information on the fairy that killed her mother. Derrick and Kiaran do not get along.
Aileana takes care of the fairy at the ball and her devoted friend Catherine who refuses to believe the ugly rumors about her covers for her at the ball saying she has a sick headache and needed to rest in the ladies room even when she sees her friend in the private area of the owners of the house a place no lady would be caught at. Later when Aileana and Kiaran are out fighting they come up against some Red Caps, which are very dangerous fairies and not supposed to be around anymore but locked up in a realm below grounds. She dispatches with two of them by herself and Kiaran gets rid of the last one. This is when Kiaran finds out that she has been hunting without him. All this time he has been disguising her kills as his. But now the faires know that there is a falconer about because she let them know by killing on her own. A falconer is one who hunts down and kills fairies and is also the ones who locked up the fairies below ground. Of course right now the seal is weakening and about to come undone. It was only a temporary measure when it was put in place as a permenant one could not be thought of. Now all of the falconers have been hunted down and killed and Aileana is the last of her kind. She needs to be the one to figure out how to fix the seal.
Catherine's brother Gavin has come home to see that she gets married off well. At a ball held by Catherine's family Aileana finds out that Gavin can see Derrick who now follows her around to help her at Kiaran's insistence she is now a target for the fairies who want to take down the falconer. Gavin hates fairies because he is a Seer and what he sees is the future and the horrible things fairies do and how hopeless he is to stop them. But he is there to help Aileana when she needs him and is attacked by a group of vicious fairy wolves and loses her seilgffiur necklace and needs his eyes to see the fairies.
This is the first book in a trilogy and it gets off to a rip-roaring start. It will be only Aileana and Kiaran against an army of fairies coming out of the gate until Aileana can reseal it. But Aileana has to also figure out how to reseal it and do it in less than two minutes because that is all the time Kiaran can fight them off by himself. Will she be able to do it? These fairies have the ability to use mind control on her and make her see what they want her to see, like painful memories of her mother's death or compel her to want to be near them and do what they want her to do. This is a compelling start to the trilogy and I must read the next one because this one leaves the ending on such a cliff hanger I have to find out what happens next.
Link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Falconer-Book-One-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B00GOJT8E0/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1492178714&sr=1-1&keywords=the+falconer
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