In ten years you can get to know a person pretty well. Especially college buddies whom you partied with, and watched fall in and out of love. You get to know them almost better than your own kin. Unless they are aliens with a secret so deep, they do not even know it themselves. Gilded Folly is the story of three people, or beings from another place or world. A world where nanobots help keep people youthful, healthy, and in control.

But control can be a two-edged sword. There are three roles in a game over one thousand years old: the assassin, Rom, the victim, Glys, and the guardian, Wick. For ten years they have lived undetected among humans. Wick and Rom in particular have become close to a group of humans. Rom has no conscious memory of what he must do, just persistent sleep walking problems that only Wick knows the cause of--until a letter with pretty glittering images sets it all off.

Gilded Folly follows three aliens and the three humans who refuse to give up on them, even after finding out they are not human. Bodies full of nanobots now awaken by the Gilded Folly begin to do what they have been programmed to do. Directing the actions, thoughts, and even feelings of these three people caught in a web in which they have no clue as to where, what or why of its existence. All they have are instinctive feelings developed among their years of living with humans, a part of the plan that the designers of the Nanobots programming never saw coming. It is this that gives them a special edge. But only if they are able to separate that which helps them survived, from that which relentlessly is guiding them to a ritual death. Until they realized, it's not even as simple as that. The balance of two worlds now rests on the six of them finding the clues and staying ahead of a one thousand year old game.

My main complaint with this story has to do with the confusing beginning. I had several false starts and had to reread the first three chapters more than once to get into the rhythm. I am all for seeing through the characters' eyes, but it has to be eyes where one can recognize what they are seeing. The reading was chaotic and too much so. A better handling of how to go from one character to another in the beginning would have made the reading much easier to comprehend. But if you stick with it, you will find a unique science fiction fantasy that uses mythology from our own American continent as its background.

Reviewed by Nancy Louise
© March 2007