The Leopard's Daughter

I read and enjoyed Lee Killough's two clever vampire/police procedural novels way back in the 1980s and picked her up again when the now-defunct Meisha Merlin published a third in that series and then the spectacular werewolf/police procedural Wilding Nights.  But I only recently noticed that Yard Dog Press brought her 1987 fantasy novel, The Leopard's Daughter, back into print in trade paperback in 2006.  I'd never read it before and had been missing a treat.

Unusually for Killough, this is not a police procedural.  It's a lovely fantasy novel that falls loosely in the "coming of age story" category and is set in ancient Africa at the time when the Sahara was just beginning to encroach on formerly green and fertile lands.  The protagonist is Jenaba, a warrior woman of the Dasa tribe who is somewhat ostracized because she was fathered by a leopard-man.  When most of her traveling companions are betrayed into the hands of man-eating monsters, Jenaba's testimony is not believed, and she is forced to leave her homeland on a quest to bring the traitor to justice and clear her own name.  This takes her through the territories of many different tribes, some friendly and some not, and eventually into the warrior ranks of the magical city of Yagana, which once mysteriously vanished from the world, only to reappear many years later.  She encounters both her leopard kin and an assortment of monsters ranging from the evil half-men (only visible from one angle) to an enchanted, thorn-covered bush man.  As her personal quest becomes entwined with the fate of Yagana itself, she is forced to seek answers in a grim underworld of angry and miserable ghosts.  All of the elements of a classic fantasy tale are deliciously transposed to a non-Western setting with an entirely different -- and beautiful -- set of myths and legends of its own.

There's an underlying message in The Leopard's Daughter about what truly makes one a monster and how very monstrous the most normal of humans can be.  But Killough doesn't get preachy about it, and the ending is a pleasingly complex resolution of matters of justice and honor and redemption.  It has that and a complex mystery (in the form of an obscure prophecy) in common with her other novels, but really is not much like them at all.  I was enormously pleased.

An added bonus in this edition is a new novella, "Aftershock," set on an alien world where the living flay the dead.  A particularly annoying war veteran has been murdered; the Emperor's brother, Ishda, is sent to judge the case and the presumed murderer.  Killough seems unable to stay completely away from the police procedural format, but this is a nicely done murder mystery and quite the tease for an intriguing alien society that could probably serve as the setting for a novel or two.

It's really a shame that no major publisher has adopted Killough and kept her books in print.  While I have no objection to Yard Dog and am pleased that they gave The Leopard's Daughter a reprint, she really deserves much wider exposure and an opportunity for better sales.

Killough has a fairly dreadful webpage up here, where you can buy some of her more recent books, and a nice interview from several years ago is here.

I highly recommend The Leopard's Daughter.  Read for yourself:

Comments

[Serge]

This sounds like something I should add to my look-for-this list.
(...)
Done.