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King Malcolm of Redhart is dead, murdered. The balance is disturbed between the Real and the Unreal at Castle Midnight and a new king must take the throne soon.

Only the power of the Crown, the Seal and the Stone beneath the throne can hold the Unreal at bay. But Crown and Seal are missing.

Malcolm's three sons vie for the throne. Being 'of the Blood', the Princes possess elemental magic: mad Dominic controls water, Lewis controls earth and Viktor has fire power. But without ascending the throne, none has the High Magic to hold back the Unreal.
There is a ceremony they must attend but Prince Viktor is too ill.

His aids find an actor to take his part and so begins our tale. The Great Jordan is down on his luck when offered this juicy but dangerous role and so accepts it, for a very high price.

A spell alters him to look like the Prince and the party rides to Castle Midnight, fending off two assassination attempts en route. Jordan proves himself brave and resourceful. He can also emulate Viktor's fire power by using the flame pellets he keeps up his stage magician sleeves. (He was a versatile one-man show and did his own special effects.)

On arrival at Castle Midnight, Jordan quickly discovers that nobles are not very noble. Good people exist, including the Steward, Catriona Taggert, and her apprentice, Damon Cord. They hold the Unreal at bay while no King sits on the throne but its power is growing fast. It's a losing battle. Soon the Unreal must overwhelm them and the kingdom will descend into chaos.

In speculative fiction you can mix two old ideas to come up with a new thing. Green has produced the unusual combination of 'Double Star', Bob Heinlein's cleverly titled, low-key Hugo award-winner and 'Hellraiser' or maybe 'Event Horizon'.

The Unreal is basically another dimension breaking into this one through gateways. Like Heinlein's hero, The Great Lorenzo, the Great Jordan starts off despised by all and slowly proves himself worthy of respect.
Writers borrowing from each other did not worry the Great Robert. He had no trouble with Tribbles.

When I started reading, I was bothered by the glaring similarities to 'Double Star' but the story soon took a different path. Green can create great monsters and villains. Indeed some of them are introduced and disposed of in a few pages and seemed worthy of more exposure. A less fecund writer might make more of his good ideas.

In the first half of the book, the 'amusing' tone grates a bit and the dialogue is twentieth century American, as in 'Xena: Warrior Princess'. 'Let's get the Hell out of here!' 'Blow it out your ear.' I suppose it's easy to bash it out but when writing of different and fantastic worlds, a chap ought to stretch himself produce more archaic stuff than that. The word Hell is way overused.

But these are minor flaws in a minor fantasy novel. We do not expect deep thoughts and complicated characters here. We are not in Graham Greeneland. We are in Storyville and this is a good story. In the age of five volume endless sagas it's nice to have a 300-page stand-alone ripping yarn to pick up for light entertainment.

I wish there were more like it.

Eammon Murphy