Following on from last year's Drakenfeld, Retribution is a nice continuation of the series, providing a keen mystery and a clever solution, playing with the idea of victim/perpetrator and the theme of revenge. Drakenfeld is a pleasant narrator, a clear successor to C.J Sansom's Shardlake, while his female companion and bodyguard gets some much needed and appreciated development here. Fans of Newton's earlier work will feel somewhat let down by the world building - Drakenfeld's world is a clear Roman cypher, mingling elements of Late Medieval / Early Renaissance Europe, without any particular attempts to bring in any of the clever New Weird stylings of the Legends of the Red Sun. The Drakenfeld series, though, continues to do what it set out to do - write a historical mystery series in a fantasy world - and to do it extremely well