Review of “The Seventh Syndicate” by Dawn Ray

Score: 87/100 (8.7 out of 10)

The Seventh Syndicate is an ambitious vampire-romance and urban fantasy novel by Dawn Ray. It especially shines in the realm of world building.

The book follows Maggie (Marjorie McClaff), a young woman struggling with artist's block who moves from South Carolina to New York to reconnect with her best friend and former classmate, Violet, who has recently experienced a tragedy. Violet has a quirky, childlike personality and seems to love her stuffed animals, particularly her pink dinosaur. Violet seems to serve as a foil for Maggie while also mirroring her inner child, which is suppressed along with her creativity.

Maggie seems to be a relatively flat character compared to Violet and others (like Armaud, Isaac, and Lenora). She serves mainly as the blank-slate protagonist thrown into the wild dual-world of the novel.

This book's major focus seems to be world building. The world building is very intricate and ambitious. After being rescued from hooligans by Isaac Levin, Maggie is recruited to work for a corporation called The Lion, which serves as a front for the titular Seventh Syndicate, one of the organizations that helps to govern and protect the lives of the world's mythical or magical beings, primarily the sasvatas (vampire-like creatures), eagnaes (witches), and hunters.

This secret second society or second world of cryptids intersects, overlaps, and interacts with the normal, mortal world. The sasvatas and eagnaes have rules and codes which they follow, among them being to do as little damage to the mortals as possible so as to protect and conceal their own existence. However, bands or cults of them still disregard these rules and kill/feed on humans, giving the rest of them a bad name.

For that reason, hunters came about to hunt the sasvatas. Some groups of hunters, likewise, took this to the extreme and chose to target not just the bad sasvatas but all sasvatas, effectively making them one of the antagonists or lingering issues in the book as Armaud, Isaac, and company are forced to deal with them to protect their kind.

The sasvatas hire retainers/bodyguards called knights (for males) and roses (for females). Maggie finds herself assigned as the personal rose to Armaud, the rough-around-the-edges leader of the Seventh Syndicate who is, in a sense, her supervisor. Initially, the two don't get along because of Maggie's stubbornness and Armaud's internal conflicts including trauma from having been turned from a human into a sasvatas in his younger life.

This book has a ton of potential. If there's one thing that holds it back, it's that it develops so slowly. We were reminded of the excessively-long wedding sequence in Twilight: Breaking Dawn. Things just drag. Characters are constantly describing, detailing, and explaining things. We were kinda hoping for more actual action—maybe some fights in which the different magical characters throw down like in the Madigan Chronicles books. Again, we want to emphasize: characters keep explaining things. Yes, there's a mythos to it that grows and grows, but it also kinda bogs down the pacing. It's almost like the book gets stuck half way through as we learn more and more about the culture of the sasvatas and the Syndicates.

The part that really got us excited was when a major character got kidnapped. We finally had some dramatic tension and something to keep us guessing or on edge. Unfortunately, we had to wait like 4/5ths of the way through the book to get to that.

This seems to be an issue not only with this book but with others like some of the Jaralii Chronicles books in which world building takes priority over telling a story that entertains and flows smoothly.

Again, this book has tremendous potential and could become a great series similar to how Jaralii Chronicles used the early world building to propel the later books.

Check it out on Amazon