These books are the beginning of the ImPerfect Cathar Series, with a special bonus story included.

The world building in this series is unique in being highly grounded in actual historical happenings while overlaying it with mythology and magic while creating a realism among the fantastic elements.

The characters have that same blend of myth, magic and realism that makes them utterly compelling to read about.

It will be a snarky, horrifying and thrilling read, so be prepared for anything. You'll still be surprised.

Welcome to the adventure.

This boxset contains the first three books in the imPerfect Cathar series and the short story, The Dark of The Water’s Edge.

Imperfect Magic

In book one of The imperfect Cathar, the main characters are Paul Bonhomme, a Good Man (Prefect of the Good People), and his colleague and companion Aicha Kandicha, a Druze Queen and undying warrior and so much more. There is also Isaac, a rabbi he met in 1209, near Toulouse, who helps Paul and his follower Benedict, to survive a possible attack from a brigand. Isaac warns them that the holy artefact Paul is carrying is putting out a strong signal many can follow and he is in danger whilst transporting it. Luckily he is only going to the keep at Foix and his responsibilities for it will be over. The Good People are being hunted down by the Catholic Church and he and others are declared as heretics, to be burned alive or hung. Events that occur soon after his interaction with Isaac, change his life forever, as he cannot die, not for long anyway. Each time he is killed, he comes to in the nearest dead body and slowly his body and face appear. He has lived over eight centuries by the time events in his city of Toulouse are threatened by someone from his past. Isaac was the creator of the Kabbalah along with his brother Jakob, and they eventually bonded and joined with the Bene Elohim, Nithael and Nanael, who we would call angels.

Nothing has been heard of Jakob or Nanael for a very long time. When trying to stop an evil wizard, Paul finds himself stuck in a prison of Elohim runes, which no one other than Isaac or Jakob should even know. Finally getting released from that, Paul gets an unexpected phone call, from a man saying he has Jakob and Nanael as prisoners and needs Paul and his team to find the holy relic, the Veil of Veronica. Nobody knows where it went after soldiers form the Crusades brought it to France. He is charged with finding it and bringing it to this man he nicknames PD, but while they are trying to plan what to do, this man pre-empts their actions and forces them to do as he wills, rather than try to figure out how to rescue Jakob and Nithael, as Isaac and they might want to do. PD takes great satisfaction in killing or forcing them to kill innocents, made to fight against Paul, Aicha and Isaac, just to protect their own families. All of these deaths he piles on Paul and tells him that everything that has happened is all his fault. Paul and his friends must find the veil, but wonder what this man will do with it and how dangerous it would be in his hands. They will not have an easy time and he will need to remember what happened to him and his fellow Good People back in the day and what started his ability to resurrect. But he and Aicha will not have an easy time, first dealing with Franc, a water dwelling creature Paul shares Toulouse with, then the enormous snail creature, Lou Carcoilh, who holds the secret of the Veil, before they end up in PD’s clutches and absolute torture before finally coming out of it all in one piece, sort of.

Imperfect Curse

In book two of The ImPerfect Cathar series and the main characters are Paul Bonhomme a Cathar, Franc a water dwelling creature, and Paul’s best friend Aicha Kandicha, a Druze Queen and undying warrior. She has gotten him out of many dangerous situations and is fed up having to help him clear things up. This time, Paul has been summoned by Franc, who needs a favour from him after finding himself cursed by the Sistren Coven of Bordeaux, who sent it through the waters of Garonne. Unfortunately, because Paul made a deal with Franc hundreds of years ago and needs to ensure he survives this. At the moment it looks like he is dying and if he does, then all of his pretty boys and girls, who have sold their souls to him, will also die and that isn’t something Paul wants on his soul. Because of their deal, Paul is going to have to visit the coven to find out what Franc has done to offend them, as they have sure used a lot of power to curse him and affect him in this manner, as Franc is a very powerful being! He drags his best friend Aicha with him, leaving behind friend Isaac who now shares his body with his angel, but now also Jakob and his angel, since the actions of his former best friend Ben, who turned into his worst enemy after being reborn multiple times.

The trip to Bordeaux brings some life changing shocks to Paul, which Aicha is at his side to avenge on his behalf. The Mother of the Sistren Coven has a story to tell him, that affects him personally, bringing sense to painful events of his past even if he can’t really cope with what he is being told! Franc told him that he feeds on the misery of his pretty lads and lasses, when they made their deal all those years ago, but that may not be completely true. Paul is to get back the magic which was stolen, eaten by Franc, but that may not be quite as easy as he hoped. Can he just let all these young people die, by doing nothing? Instead, he has to open his big mouth and ask another question of the almost unintelligible and verbose Franc, who I have to say is not my favourite parts of the story. I find myself having to just skim them over and ignore the majority of it, unlike other reviewers, as it just annoys me too much. It nearly had me giving up on the book altogether, as I came across the first section of this style of speech. Finding it again when they get back to Toulose, from Bordeaux, is too much. His only option now is to go to the one place he may not make it back from, especially all in one piece! I loved Aicha’s character, her fierce warrior style and the knowledge of a very long life to do as she wishes now. Once I ignore Franc’s speech and pages and pages of his talking only to mean very little, parts of the rest of the story can draw you in. Just not enough to fully enjoy the experience for me though.

Imperfect Fae

So much has gone wrong for Paul Bonhomme at the end of the previous book, and this one starts with him trying to drink all his sorrows away. He has split with his best friend and companion for ages, Aicha, for her decision to kill Franc, the water creature who owned the bodies of loads of the homeless in Toulouse and elsewhere. His death meant the death of all those he controlled as well, which had stopped Paul from killing him himself! Franc had killed one of the daughters of the Mother of the Sistren coven of Bordeaux and taken her magic. Messed up by the betrayal of his ex-wife and the child he long thought dead, have messed him up completely. But the worst situation was killing the demi-goddess Melusine, pretending to be the Lady of Lourdes, who managed to eat most of his magic first! His wife Susane double-crossed him and was working with his son instead, not the coven who had her watching him interact with Franc. She clearly fears her own son for some reason and Paul can’t stand that. He gave Melusine’s heart to the daughter of the Mother of the Sistren coven, so they could get her magic back. He hadn’t even thought about getting his own magic back from it first. Getting drunk now, is so much quicker an experience than it used to be when he had magic. Isaac and Jakob find Paul as he drunkenly tries to stop a group of yobs attacking a woman and he ends up almost ding for his attempts at helping. He gets told to call Isaac this time, like he was supposed to the previous time, when he comes to in another body in the morgue. Isaac and co are there to help track down his wife with him, but he will need to be sober to do so. Isaac and Jakob (and Nithael and Nanael as well) have clues to where his wife Susane’s mother Gwendolyne is, which Paul will bite at, but he can’t face asking about his son, who is apparently a powerful and evil fae, just yet. He wants to face both his wife and son, to ask for Melusine’s wish granting sceptre back!

Isaac was the one who knew Gwendolyne and introduce Paul to her daughter, so she is unlikely to have forgiven him yet, especially since her daughter was killed. Which means she will want to see Paul even less. His son has probably escaped back to Fae and the only one who can tell them anything is Gwendolyne. She is a Cagot, cursed by the Fae king Oberon, to live in exile from Faerie. She cannot get back into Faerie while still living her first life, nor can Isaac or Jakob with their angel like inner selves. Gwendolyne states the Fae Courts came together when the angels tried to attack, beating them back and closing all the gates bar one, only the one for the Cagot, who either work as slaves as such, for the Fae, or work their way up in the Fae realm, leaving their humanity behind. The Fae don’t want Earth and its iron poisoned lands and waters to be part of their realm anymore. There is only one Fae who can travel through the portal to the Winter Court, ruled by Maeve, and that is the Cagot mercenary, Half-Marred Jack, or Jack of Plate, who Paul has certainly heard about! He once had to hunt him down to protect another who heard a contract had been taken out on him, but ended up as the first one of his team to be killed, finding the rest dead in horrible circumstances once he came back in a new body. Rumours of Jack doing so much more, the worst of which was free travel back and forth to Maeve doing as she wished, the main one to bring children to her! He stops every twenty years or so in one place, and numbers of children somehow disappear. He has just settled in Lyon and so Paul and Isaac/Jakob need to leave.

Paul makes Isaac/Jakob stop off to allow him to see Lou Carcoilh, the enormous snail who lives under a mountain, feared by the locals. Paul needs one of the skulls he left for safe-keeping with Lou, that of Arnaud Almeric. He will use it to track Half-Marred Jack and try to find where he is stashing the kids he has stolen from their beds, before he has enough to pass them onto Maeve. Jack manages to sense Paul stalking him and catches him unaware, managing to slit his throat yet again. Isaac isn’t happy that Paul has set off so many of Jack’s alarms, making Jack hide away and it will be even harder to put a stop to what he is doing. If they fail, then Paul will be the Tarrasque’s slave for the next year! He needs to work with Gwendolyne, the Queen of the Cagots, who has been the King of the Summer Court, Oberon’s puppet for eons, to find a way into Fae with Isaac and Jakob’s assistance of course. He needs to take over a fae body on his next resurrection and taking down Half-Marred Jack, would give him that, whilst also taking out a dangerous enemy. Paul thought he only had to worry about Arnaud coming back to life, as he found out earlier that he wasn’t the only one affected by him destroying the Holy Grail. Hunting down his former dead wife Susane and what he believed was his son, is soon going to bring the bad memories of Simon De Montfort to mind and find he has been followed and tricked by more than just his former student Benedict! His time in Faerie will not go well for him and he will need to be rescued from a fate worse than death, by the only one he could always rely upon in a pinch.


The Dark of The Water’s Edge

A short tale of a young man call Gil, who awakes in a hospital suffering from yet another chesty infection. It brings memories of his childhood and the strange things he could see all around him. He was sent to be cured and that took an unpleasant nature, more akin to torture and he suffered even more. Escaping his homelike was the only choice, but that didn’t exactly bring him peace and only a drug addict lover, whom he tried to please and did things he never wanted to, just to get what his lover needed the most. Even that doesn’t bring anything good for him and he continues to follow the waterways as he meanders through the country. Doing so brings him to the sight of the water bound creature Franc, who rises form the water and offers him a different kind or role and a lessening of pain perhaps. He is told the truth of what an agreement would mean, none of which are great, but may well be better than the life he currently leads. He will have to allow Franc to use his body to view his area and gather information for him, but he seems this might be a better life ad allows Franc to draw him below the water’s surface! Just a small glimpse into Franc’s recruitment system and the kind of people he claims as hi.


Still more to come from the imPerfect Cathar world and from Paul Bonhomme, Isaac/Jakob and even Aicha. Lots more dangerous adventures no doubt, with Paul jumping in headfirst and it being left to Isaac and Aicha to save him and make some plans on what to do next. The enemies form his past have been coming for Paul and have managed to hide their presence from Paul and others for centuries. Many have learnt what happens to Paul whenever he is killed and leave him in an undying prison of their making. Now without most of his magic, he is ever more in danger and liable when they have to stop dangerous foes. I will have to wait and see if he ever gets this magic back in one of the next books of the series.

I received an ARC copy of this boxset and I have freely given my own opinion of the books above.

4 ½ - 5 stars