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The King’s Executioner

I would recommend The King’s Executioner for rabid fans of Vikings currently waiting for the next season, for readers super into tattooed bad boy Iron-Age heroes, or for folks who are tired of reading historicals set in the same time periods over and over and over. It’s a good book, but it wasn’t outstanding and more than anything it made me wish for more books set in this era.

Anin is a young woman who has been chosen to marry the Pict king, except she doesn’t want to. When she–and her family–don’t immediately acquiesce to that request, the king sends his executioner/torturer/all around scary dude Paine to retrieve her. Paine is a heavily tattooed, muscled, sexy dude with a trained black wolf named Bog. Of course he rescued a baby wolf and raised it Jon Snow style. Of course he did.

Paine retrieves Anin and most of the book is their journey to the king. Paine is the quiet broody type–he claims to be a bad person because he tortures and kills people, which…yeah, that’s not great…and he also says he’s surrounded and basically poisoned by death. Anin is an empath, a secret she’s kept from everyone, and when she touches Paine she can feel his emptiness. Conveniently, she can also feel when he starts falling in love with her. Conveniently we only ever see Paine torture (off screen) and kill bad people. There is an attempted rape in this book so trigger warning–and Paine kills that guy too.

I enjoyed the book but found it lacking in the historical detail I usually crave. To be fair, not a whole lot is known about the Picts (my Google searches to validate the authenticity of the name Paine were fruitless or at least interrupted by cat videos), but I love when books include details about how every day life was carried out—how food was collected and stored, how homes were built, etc. Last night I was pestering Redheadedgirl for more detail about eating boiled sheep’s head (as info, autocorrect changes that to “Sherpa head,” which is a whole new level of horrifying). For the most part Paine and Anin eat berries and fish and just spend a lot of time walking though nondescript woods. The book also felt too long–like the middle dragged on longer than necessary.

If you need some tattooed, axe-wielding, warrior heroes in your life, then pick up The King’s Executioner, but if you’re a stickler for historical detail, maybe steer clear.

– Elyse

The King of the Pict has entered into an agreement with Cathbad, Overlord of the Western Region to wed his daughter Anin. Blyth, Anin’s mother, has given her husband four fine sons and King Talon hopes Anin will do the same for him. Unfortunately, Anin’s mother wants no part of the agreement. She intends for her daughter to pick a husband of her own choosing as the women of her tribe do. She sends Anin away and no amount of threats or persuasion will make Blyth confess her daughter’s whereabouts and so King Talon sends the one man he knows who can force the woman to speak and to bring Anin to him—his executioner.
Paine is feared by all, and rightfully so. He has the power to bring great suffering and with one swing of his double-sided axe a swift death. He has been sent to collect the future Queen and deliver her to King Talon. An easy mission and one he wants to see finished quickly, but from the moment he meets Anin he knows that will prove a challenge.
Anin has no choice but to go with the executioner and wed the High King, though she would prefer not to, especially after she meets the executioner. He brings things alive in her that she has been forced to keep hidden and as her secrets begin to surface so do her feelings for the executioner.
The couple faces insurmountable challenges on their journey to Pictland and even more when they finally stand before the King.