By Amy Kuivalainen

The King’s Seal is the concluding volume in Amy Kuivalainen’s The Magicians of Venice trilogy. At the end of the second book, we know that there is a ring prophesied to be used to defeat Thevetat, if only Penelope and the magicians can find it. Tim has left a large amount of information on Penelope’s laptop about the visions he had during his “curse”, but they are in a very jumbled order. Thus begins a great task to find clues within the text, trace them to a figure/event in history and thus slowly put the path together to find the last location of the ring. At the same time, Thevetat and his forces are strong and moving towards the goal of harvesting the approaching high tide to give Thevetat a body and bring forth more demons to rule the earth. Every step that the magicians and their allies take is met with even more retribution. But Kreios is fighting his possession, anyway he can – will this give them the edge they need?

Penelope learns more about her magic, and gains even more. We find out why she was chosen by Nereus as her heir, and why she and Alexis have been drawn together from the very beginning. Unsurprisingly, there are some rather pat answers to questions in the book, but overall this was a pretty good conclusion to the series. It does feel like the ending was left open though for a potential return to the characters – especially for Marco, Constantine and Kreios.

This book wasn’t groundbreaking, nor was the series, and it definitely won’t be up there with those that I have loved. But it was a fun and engaging read. I wanted to learn more and I read it through quite quickly wanting to know what would happen to different characters. It felt like the romance side of the story was getting stronger and stronger with each book, and there were times in this last volume that I wanted it to hurry up and get on with the story, but it didn’t detract too much from the story.

I think the author shows some promise, and it would be interesting to see where she goes next, but there will be many more authors ahead of her in my reading queue. If you are interested in an easy read series based on magic in the real world, and if you love the idea of visiting (or revisiting) Venice while you’re at it, it’s a series worth giving a try.