This is a wonderful book. Sort of a magical telling of the time of the crusades. With the original assassins and genies thrown in. Good jumping off point for learning about history. I looked a lot of stuff up after I read it to find out the real story.

The best part of this story however is the language. Reading this book is like reading poetry. Judith Tarr presents the English language in all its beauty without beating you over the head with how clever she is. You can tell a story or you can tell a story with words that evoke images as brilliant as a stained glass window. ( )

A historical fantasy set in the reign of Baldwin IV of Jerusalem. It falls between books 1 and 2 of The Hound and the Falcon.

Prince Aidan of Caer Gwent (one of the Fair Folk) has come to Outremer to take the cross and to visit his sister’s son. He has been assassinated; his wife, Lady Margaret, is a member of the House of Ibrahim and Sinan of Alamut has decided the House would be useful to their cause. In pursuit of this, he also murders Lady Margaret’s son by her first husband and threatens her daughter.

Swearing revenge, Prince Aidan escorts her daughter to Aleppo, and draws out the assassin - the Slave of Alamut - who is one of the Fair Folk herself.

This is the story of Prince Aiden’s quest for revenge and the two women he comes to love - Joanna, Lady Margaret’s daughter, and Morgiana, the Slave of Alamut.

Recommended, but note there are some OCR errors in the text (which don’t detract from the story).

A historical fantasy set in the Crusader days of the Assassins and of the Leper King of Jerusalem. An Ifrit [spirit of fire], Prince Aidan, from what sounds like a fictional Wales or Ireland, visits his human relatives in Jerusalem. His nephew has been killed, then after he attaches himself to him as "squire", his grand-nephew, the boy Thibault, is murdered. Aidan meets the Leper King and promises to declare fealty to him once he has taken vengeance on the Assassins. Saladin gives him a group of mamluks who follow him implicitly. A harrowing journey with obstacles set in his way, from Jerusalem, Damascus, Aleppo, to the stronghold, Alamut, follows. After attempted murder of Aidan's ladylove, he realizes he is up against another immortal power, such as himself, the ifritah, Morgiana.

In the first half, the history seemed pretty solid; in the last half, the fantasy took over. The book was enjoyable, but the copious amount of romance--between Aidan and Thibault's sister, the human Joanna--was cloying and to me, TOO descriptive. I was uncomfortable, in any case. That aspect could have been cut way down. I may or may not read the sequel; I feel the story could have ended very nicely here. ( )

I love this book to an alarming degree. Though it's kind of a riff on elven kind in real life, it's also a pretty solid piece of crusade history. A bit of the supernatural added to a real piece of history.

Alamut was so engaging--with swords and assassins and bold power plays--but what really drew me in was the real history part. The whole Baldwin thing fascinated me so much that after I finished reading this book, I went and got some history books on the crusades and Jerusalem. The magic just emphasized my brain's interest on absorbing the real history stuff.

A supernatural romance, solid historical settings, and a hunt for an unstoppable assassin. Very much thumbs up. ( )

I consider Alamut and its sequel The Dagger and the Cross as spin-offs from the Hound and Falcon Trilogy (The Isle of Glass, The Golden Horn, and The Hounds of God), though I believe Alamut occurs first, chronologically. All of these are set in the 12-13 c., but they are fantasies--the protagonists are not quite human and are capable of magic. They are unbelievably fair--both in terms of pale complexions and inhuman beauty--they are effectively immortal, and have been considered djinns, witches, fairies, elves, depending on the circumstances. And over the decades they have gathered from across the continent to the (imaginary) kingdom of Rhiyana. But the fictional plotlines are tightly woven into actual historical events of the day.

Alamut takes place in the Middle East. The hero, Prince Aidan of Rhiyana goes to visit his mortal nephew in the Holy Land, now that the Crusaders have reclaimed the region for Christianity. However, he arrives too late; his nephew was assassinated (in the original sense of the word--murdered by the hashishayun, a fanatical Muslim (Shi'ite?) sect. He vows vengeance, and of course it turns out that the assassin is one of his own kind, Morgiana, long enslaved to the sect. She has never before met one of her kind and is instantly smitten. It's basically a romance with a very rocky beginning.

The story is told from four viewpoints: Aidan, Morgiana, and their female sidekicks--in his case, Joanna, the married stepdaughter of his late nephew, in her case, Sayyida, the married daughter of the weaponsmith who forges her assassin's blades. It takes Aidan way too long to figure out that Morgiana is the assassin. That's a little annoying. And Morgiana sure doesn't sound like anything vaguely Arabic. Those are really my only complaints. Tarr does a good job showing some of the cultural and economic aspects of Middle Eastern society, both domestic and public. Her female characters are all strong and capable, and she shows how they fit into the patriarchal societies of both faiths. The balance of coexistence and tension between Christianity and Islam, both militarily and culturally, is also portrayed quite well. It's also a who's who of the political leaders of the Holy Lands during that time period, including Saladin and Baldwin IV. In other words, this is an easy way to learn something about the Middle Ages during part of the Crusading era. The author's note at the end does a good job explaining where she took liberties with the history and geography and listing useful nonfiction resources. ( )