Last Tide
Synopsis
The capital has fallen. Ghostly wraiths and bloodthirsty selkies roam the coast as the haar spreads its sickness across Silveckan. Every day, another port is consumed by the mist, and without her pelt, Isla Blackwood can do nothing to stop it.
Her only hope is to track down Eimhir, but her old friend has her own demons to battle, and she’s made it clear she doesn’t want to be found.
Instead, Isla must turn to the Sea Kith for an alliance. Their common enemy, the Grand Admiral, draws ever closer, and he won’t rest until the sea and everything in it is in his grasp once more.
Reunited with Darce and the soul bond they share, Isla prepares to sail into one last storm. If she survives it, she might be able to end decades of bloodshed between human and selkie. But if she fails, Silveckan will be lost to the mists forever…
Review
I still fondly remember the time, a mere two years ago—but in the relentless gallows humour churn of the 2020s it may as well have been two decades ago—when I picked up a new dark fantasy trilogy opener, Sea of Souls. I was entranced by its salt-spray confection of monsters from Scottish folklore, real-world themes of endless cycles of violence (selkies and humans replacing the many real-world conflicts this saga is reminiscent of), atmospheric prose, and character conflicts etched out in quiet, heartbreaking moments. It was my favourite book of that year, and it felt a little emotional to read the concluder in the trilogy, Tides of Torment. It also felt a little emotional for the more straightforward reason that this is a very emotional book, full of dramatic conclusions to arcs with characters whose torments we have ridden with on the high seas for three books. It’s also a ridiculously thrilling tale, which barely stops for breath even as it’s sapping your heart muscles. It is, in short, a trilogy closer that gives us everything we could have wanted from a fantasy series that has given us so much.
The plot is simple, at least at first; we are in the home stretch now, and Isla Blackwood, eternally torn between the selkies and humans, must finally face down both her selkie found family and their tortured, violent selkie ghosts before they lay waste to her human homeland, while also finally defeating the selkie-butchering Admiralty under the command of her chilling father, who just won’t die in the very literal sense. The team around her includes her brother Lachlan, closer than ever to her but still smarting from old grievances; Darce, her soul-bonded beau; and her Uncle Muir, who has his own scores to settle with the villainous Admiral. But somewhere out there is her selkie sister Eimhir, and destiny awaits.
This is a trilogy closer framed around the classic saga-closing structure: the desperate race against overwhelming odds, trying to secure new allies for the final battle ahead. And one very impressive thing about this book is that how, while Scrimgeour introduces a whole host of new allies—from new magic-welding sentinels with bones to pick against the big bad admiral to roguish pirates—they are each given a proper fleshed out character arc and serve to expand this world much further than even the previous book, all in the service of showing just how much pain this endless cycle of violence between selkies and humans has caused. But this new cast is never to the detriment of our core quartet of Isla, Lachlan, Darce, and Eimhir, whose loyalties and capacity for heartbreak are constantly tested in ways that will render your blood pressure as shaky as the ocean waves. And then there’s the action set pieces: non stop, from serpent attacks to pirate battles to frantic sea battles against daunting man o’ wars to daring prison rescues. Somehow this book is a constant flow of character moments among an endless tide of action set pieces, and the way Scrimgeour has balanced this is genuinely impressive.
Thematically, too, the true depth of this series is revealed in this book. The use of the concept of selkie pelts, and the souls they contain, is such a brilliant metaphor. From the strange misty dimension of the haar that is created from soulless selkies to Isla’s attempts to heal the ancestral pain of her species through the shared experience of their very souls through to the special soul bond that even non-selkies like her beloved Darce can exhibit, this is a book committed to examining the question of how endless cycles of violence can be healed, and if so by what means. The themes of sharing pain to heal pain rings true throughout and it’s through subtle ways like this that the fantasy genre shows its power to shine a light on real-world historic trauma.
But the real gem of this series for me has always been in those quiet character moments where characters are torn between impossible choices, struggling to keep their bonds between them even as these choices tear them apart. Scrimgeour has this perfect blend of operatic emotion with quiet, haunting subtlety that makes these moments feel biting real; and one particular climatic encounter here we’ve been waiting for doesn’t disappoint in that regard. And the ending—the ending, inevitably, left me crying. Whether through sadness or joy that’s for you to discover, but it is, as I always knew it would be, perfect.
Overall, Tides of Torment is a desperate race against time to end a cycle of violence full of impossible choices and pulse-pounding high seas action that pauses for breath only to rip apart your heart. It’s a showstopping lesson in how to conclude a trilogy and we can now say what has been clear for a while; this is one of the unmissable fantasy series of the decade.
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