Lady of Misrule is the eighth of the Marla Mason novels by T.A. Pratt.
Finished on: 21.10.2020
[Here are my reviews of the other Marla Mason novels.]

Plot:
When Marla awakes from her month in the underworld, she faces quite a few surprising changes in the mortal world. For one, Pelham and Rondeau are in trouble (well, that may not be the biggest change) and things are happening in Felport. But that is not even the biggest issue: there is something walking the earth, looking for gods to kill – and it might as well start with Marla. The threat is so big that Bradley Bowman, overseer of the multiverse, sends a part of himself to that particular universe to make sure that it doesn’t spread from there. Things are dire. Or, to put it another way, just another Tuesday for Marla.

Lady of Misrule takes fans of the series on a rather comfortable ride – until it hits you with a suckerpunch of an ending that left me with my mouth open. Talk about a cliffhanger – I will need to read the next one soon.

When I say that the book is comfortable, I mean that it works with many known ingredients, bringing back old characters and themes to work with them some more, though it also includes new characters like Marzi who I definitely loved (her relationship with her boyfriend is perfect). Along the way there are definitely some new ideas and the plot is well-developed, but even the new stuff feels familiar, in a good way – it just fits into the established world.

Until it suddenly doesn’t anymore. Marla, who always struggled with doing the right thing, and not just the practical thing, makes a very bad decision towards the end which will need to be dealt with in the subsequent book(s) and at the same time, there’s a completely unexpected character death that left me surprisingly devastated and that will make dealing with Marla’s bad decision pretty hard, I’m afraid. So I’m very interested to see how Pratt will solve that conundrum.

But in any case, I absolutely enjoyed Lady of Misrule. There were a couple typos here and there, but they were absolutely outweighed by the sense of humor and the jokes that abound. And overall, I just really like spending time with these characters and in their world.

Summarizing: good fun.