A Restless Truth

A Restless Truth is a historical fantasy novel by the Australian writer Freya Marske, published in 2022 as the second book of the Last Binding trilogy.

The ship is the whole setting, which makes the book a closed-circle mystery as well as a romance: a fixed list of passengers, several days of sea, and a corpse that has to be dealt with before anybody notices. Maud has been raised to be respectable and has spent the voyage so far being useful to somebody else, and Violet is a scandal in human form, a woman who performs on stage, uses magic openly and has no intention of explaining herself. The crossing also sets the pace, since the two of them cannot leave the ship, cannot avoid each other at that distance and have nowhere to be private except in each other's company. Marske uses the investigation to keep them talking after the misunderstandings, and the agreements and bindings that structure the magic in the first book are the subject of the conspiracy the siblings are chasing. It continues the series that began with A Marvellous Light.