Irissa and Kendric

Series · 5 books · 1982-1989

By Carole Nelson Douglas

Books in series

Six of Swords

1982

Irissa was the last of the sorcerous Torlocs, untutored in magic and abandoned upon this decaying world by her people. Kendric was one of the Six of Swords, gifted with a legendary weapon to guard the Realms from harm. But now he was an outcast, and his death was sought with reason by the other Five. Sorceress and swordsman, they were thrown together; each filled with ancient prejudices against the other. But only by combining her uncertain powers with his remaining skills could they survive. Survive they must, however. Rule was a world formed upon magic - but now magic was failing and there would soon be no place for it. And destiny in strange guise had chosen them to make one last stand against the dark forces that were waiting at the Gate of Valna, seeking to destroy their world

Exiles of the Rynth

1984

Irissa, last of the Torloc sorceresses, had been betrayed by the rainbow gate that was supposed to lead her to the haven world of her vanished people. The hand of Kendric, companion and Swordsman of Rule, had been torn from her grasp. Then the gate had rejected her into this strange world where a cold moon hung forever unmoving in the sky. Now she was a prisoner of the Stonekeeper Sofistron. Around her encircled the pale walls of her cell, filled with half-seen reflections of herself. She was helpless, all her power drained into those other-self images. And this time, there was no Kendric to save her. He was a swordless exile in the Rynth, stranded among the Unkept women and the rim-runner outlaws from the magic Stonekeeps. Somewhere, she knew, there had to be another gate, a way out from this hostile world. Somewhere, somehow...

Keepers of Edanvant

1987

Silver Eyed Irissa, the Torloc Seeress, has been searching for her people and their homeworld, Edanvant, through years, through Gates between worlds. Accompanied by Kendric the Wrathman, the human skeptic who, by bed bond, has gained the magical powers he utterly distrusts, Irissa finds an Edanvant far bleaker than she hoped - a family that is not a family, a people divided against itself, a planet walled and threatened.

Heir of Rengarth

1988

Evil wizard Geronfrey seeks the very essence of lovely Irissa, and the baby she carries. Kendric enters Geronfrey's tower to confront him and vanishes into the magic land of Rengarth. Now Irissa must risk her life in the enchanted kingdom to save her love's life.

Seven of Swords

1989

Middle age is creeping up on the Torloc seeress Irissa and her husband Kendric, Wrathman of Rule, in the latest installment of Douglas' extended fantasy saga. Their teenage children are quite enough to keep them busy as their daughter Javelle resents not having her mother's witchy powers and their son Thane, first Torloc male to inherit magical talent, has to adjust to his fate. After the long-lived seeress is shocked into recognition of Kendric's mortality by his graying hair, Javelle and Thane, with the magic cat Felabba, set out to retrieve their father's only hope, the seventh of the Six Swords of Rule. Carrying less of the heavy baggage of romantic melodrama than previous volumes, this is brisker and more readable, even if it still leans portentously toward shadows and dreams, spectres and dooms.

Author

Carole Nelson Douglas

Author · 67 books

Carole Nelson Douglas is the author of sixty-four award-winning novels in contemporary and historical mystery/suspense and romance, high and urban fantasy and science fiction genres. She is best known for two popular mystery series, the Irene Adler Sherlockian historical suspense series (she was the first woman to spin-off a series from the Holmes stories) and the multi-award-winning alphabetically titled Midnight Louie contemporary mystery series. From Cat in an Alphabet Soup #1 to Cat in an Alphabet Endgame #28. Delilah Street, PI (Paranormal Investigator), headlines Carole's noir Urban Fantasy series: Dancing With Werewolves, Brimstone Kiss, Vampire Sunrise, Silver Zombie, and Virtual Virgin. Now Delilah has moved from her paranormal Vegas to Midnight Louie, feline PI's "Slightly surreal" Vegas to solve crimes in the first book of the new Cafe Noir series, Absinthe Without Leave. Next in 2020, Brandi Alexander on the Rocks. Once Upon a Midnight Noir is out in eBook and trade paperback versions. This author-designed and illustrated collection of three mystery stories with a paranormal twist and a touch of romance features two award-winning stories featuring Midnight Louie, feline PI and Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator in a supernatural-run Las Vegas. A third story completes the last unfinished story fragment of Edgar Allan Poe, as a Midnight Louie Past Life adventure set in 1790 Norland on a isolated island lighthouse. Louie is a soldier of fortune, a la Puss in Boots. Next out are Midnight Louie's Cat in an Alphabet Endgame in hardcover, trade paperback and eBook Aug. 23, 2016. All the Irene Adler novels, the first to feature a woman from the Sherlock Holmes Canon as a crime solver, are now available in eBook. Carole was a college theater and English literature major. She was accepted for grad school in Theater at the University of Minnesota and Northwestern University, and could have worked as an editorial assistant at Vogue magazine (a la The Devil Wears Prada) but wanted a job closer to home. She worked as a newspaper reporter and then editor in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. During her time there, she discovered a long, expensive classified advertisement offering a black cat named Midnight Louey to the "right" home for one dollar and wrote a feature story on the plucky survival artist, putting it into the cat's point of view. The cat found a country home, but its name was revived for her feline PI mystery series many years later. Some of the Midnight Louie series entries include the dedication "For the real and original Midnight Louie. Nine lives were not enough." Midnight Louie has now had 32 novelistic lives and features in several short stories as well. Hollywood and Broadway director, playwright, screenwriter and novelist Garson Kanin took Carole's first novel to his publisher on the basis of an interview/article she'd done with him five years earlier. "My friend Phil Silvers," he wrote, "would say he'd never won an interview yet, but he had never had the luck of you." Carole is a "literary chameleon" who's had novels published in many genres, and often mixes such genre elements as mystery and suspense, fantasy and science fiction, romance with mainstream issues, especially the roles of women.