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In the Eye of Heaven [Hardcover]

David Keck (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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Book Description

Release Date: April 4 2006
From a strong new voice in epic fantasy comes the tale of Durand, a good squire trying to become a good knight in a harsh and unforgiving world.

Set to inherit the lordship of a small village in his father's duchy because the knight of that village has been bereaved of his own son, Durand must leave when the son unexpectedly turns up alive.

First he falls in with a band of knights working for a vicious son of a duke and ends up participating in the murder of the duke's adulterous wife. Fleeing, he comes into the service of a disgraced second son of a duke, Lamoric, who is executing a long subterfuge to try to restore his honor in the eyes of his father, family, and king. By entering tournaments anonymously as "The Red Knight," Durand will demonstrate his heroism and prowess and be drafted into the honors of the king. 

But conspiracies are afoot--dark plots that could break the oaths which bind the kingdom and the duchies together and keep the banished monsters at bay. It may fall to Durand to save the world of Man…

Authentic and spellbinding, In the Eye of Heaven weaves together the gritty authenticity of a Glen Cook with the high-medieval flair epitomized by Gene Wolfe's The Knight, to begin an epic multi-volume tale that will take the fantasy world by storm.

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Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. At the start of Keck's winning debut, a gritty medieval fantasy full of enchantment, young squire Durand is on his way home to ask his father for the wherewithal to purchase the fine linen he needs for his knighting ceremony. Durand has prospects in the form of a small holding or fiefdom of his own, Gravenholm. But in a flash his luck changes. Durand loses Gravenholm and becomes a landless shield-bearer whose only option is to become a knight-errant—in effect a mercenary who owes allegiance to anyone who chooses to pay his wages. Desperate for food and troubled by strange magical omens, he accepts a position that proves disastrous. Durand is a convincingly human character who isn't preternaturally skilled or supersmart like so many fantasy heroes, yet he manages to rise to the various challenges he faces. Though this deftly told tale isn't billed as the first of a series, one hopes there'll be further adventures of the memorable Durand. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Young Durand has a problem. He was all set to inherit the lordship of his home village, on account of the knight who is its overlord, judge, protector, and general government having lost his son. He has endured a lot of training to replace the missing heir. Then Sonny shows up, resumes his place, and Durand has to take it on the lam. While his lordly skills give him a better chance of surviving, the people he meets on the road require everything he can muster up to be dealt with. They constitute a sort of lowlife version of the Canterbury Tales pilgrims and represent the grungier side of medieval societies very well. Durand finds them invaluable allies, however, when he must confront a resurgence of evil magic. Said magic isn't as well realized as other aspects of the book, but Keck in his first book performs substantially better than many a fantasy hand, encouraging hopes for better magic in successors to this yarn whose readers may hope will follow soon. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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5.0 out of 5 stars Gritty realism in fantasy Oct 3 2010
By Brian Ashe TOP 500 REVIEWER
Format:Mass Market Paperback
I found this book on a remainder shelf, and read it about six months later. Wow! I immediately bought #2, and am waiting for #3 to arrive. My favorite genre is gritty fantasy, and this is it. The first chapter or so read like historical fiction of medieval France, but the supernatural soon intrudes, and it's not your mother's fairy stories. The Other is there, hard and angular and dangerous. The Other is sometimes magical, but often just full of sharp teeth.
Keck sets up a realistically dark world full of elder inhabitants that really don't like humans. Survival is marginal even in peace time. In a war of succession, famine and disease set a bleak backdrop to the fighting.
Human reality, too, is dangerous. What options for a dispossessed fighting man but to fight, for an unknown man-at-arms but to join a band that's down on its luck, with a leader who has also been dispossessed? How to deal with betrayals? How to deal with your own complicity in those betrayals?
This is a story set in a harsh world, as medieval France surely was, with the military element blending into the supernatural. Loyalty is tough to keep, friendships hard to win, and fortune unattainable. Life is grim, with moments of comradeship and levity, but these are rare, while wounds and death are common. Nevermind, this is an amazing book, gripping and highly recommended.
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5.0 out of 5 stars High and low fantasy combined excellently Aug 8 2006
By C. Cameron
Format:Hardcover
If you like your fantasy at all real, you'll like this book. Our hero is young and does the foolish things young men do. He ignores portents, he whips out his sword when other options might have been wiser, he has honor and love and he scratches at lice and wrings out a soaking bedroll and has rust on his chainmail. All this in a world with maybe not "magic," but religion and priests and ghosts and rules that only the author knows but everyone in the story lives with. This novel is raw, honest, gritty, and you want to know what happens next, to our hero, to his companions, and to the world they live in.
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5.0 out of 5 stars A new voice of great significance: David Keck April 14 2006
By Darren L. Lodge
Format:Hardcover
The caliber of David Keck's talent is evident from the outset of his magnificent debut novel, In the Eye of Heaven. His lean prose tangles its fingers in the scruff of your nightshirt and jerks you into the mud and brambles of Creation, a world humbling in its depth and authenticity.

From sword-polishing to the accuracy of battle-injury, the layout of keeps and castles to the very real horror of ancient dentistry, at no point does Keck's strong hand not lead astutely and confidently. His knowledge of medieval life and history is astonishing, and his skill at making that knowledge relevant to his story is exemplary.

But this world is not composed entirely of sandpaper realism. Here, fairy tales and chilling morality plays are based in fact - there IS an Otherplace, and the veil that separates it from our heroes' reality is not only thin, but in places torn to tatters and worn as rags by those things that have stepped from it seeking prey. Here, the Brothers Grimm would caper and dance, shouting down doubters with cries of, "Told you so!" The appearances of these Others and the peeks we get of their side of reality are gloriously haunting, and always gratifying.

Details aside, it is on strength of story and successful characterization that a novel is judged - and here is where In the Eye of Heaven shines brightest. Durand, and the cast that support - and oppose - his evolving struggle are fully developed and each discernable by their personal motivations.

Because, In the Eye of Heaven is the first installment of a three-part story-arc, Keck does strategically dangle several unresolved plot-threads at the book's end like glittering lures, enticing us to seek out book two. Let the wait be a short one!

Courageous, assured, chilling - In the Eye of Heaven. Bravo!

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