Fin­ished Magic Lost, Trou­ble Found by Lisa Shearin. This is the first book in her Raine Benares epic fan­tasy series. Note: In the inter­est of full dis­clo­sure, Lisa recently gave me a cover blurb for Spider’s Bite, the first book in my new Ele­men­tal Assas­sin series.

Raine is an elf and a sor­cer­ess who spe­cial­izes in find­ing things that are lost for peo­ple. But she’s the one who finds her­self in trou­ble when she comes into pos­ses­sion of a mag­i­cal amulet which is the key to find­ing a very old, very pow­er­ful mag­i­cal arti­fact. The amulet makes Raine more pow­er­ful her­self, but there’s one small prob­lem — every­one and his brother want to get their hands on it and the only way that Raine can get rid of the amulet is to die. Some­thing that a par­tic­u­larly nasty gob­lin shaman who’s hunt­ing Raine doesn’t have a big prob­lem with …

I spot­ted a blog post on this series a while back and thought that it sounded cool. So I decided to check it out. I’m glad I did. What I liked most about the book was Raine. She’s a great char­ac­ter — smart and capa­ble but some­one who still knows her own lim­its and isn’t afraid to ask for help when she needs it. Also, it was refresh­ing to see a first-person, kick-butt, female hero­ine in an epic fan­tasy, instead of your usual farmboy-with-a-great-destiny type of character.

I also liked the fact that Shearin did some dif­fer­ent things with her fan­tasy world, like make her gob­lins sexy instead of the slob­ber­ing green mon­sters that they’re usu­ally por­trayed as. And she did a lot with her magic/world build­ing with­out going on about it for pages and pages. (As a side note, that’s a bit of a pet peeve of mine. As much as I like epic fan­tasy, I think a lot of books in the genre could use some trim­ming when it comes to their world build­ing, espe­cially peo­ple like Robert Jordan).

Over­all, if you’re look­ing for a new fan­tasy series to try, espe­cially one with a female lead char­ac­ter, check this one out. Thumbs up.

Up next: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.

Books in my TBR pile: About 14.