Jesherah is a healer in training at the Sword Goddess Shrine, while she had been born to work the forge at one of the holdings, Jesherah was determined to help people through healing. To that end she has been working diligently to learn the healing herbs she will need for her craft but also those that can be deadly. Like so many things Jesherah knows that the plants she uses are a double-edged sword. One evening a messenger from one of the holdings rushed into the shrine calling for Head Priestess Varana, one of the leaders from her holding is very ill. Varana rushes out and does what she can, but the woman passes the next day. Soon after more people in the holdings begin to fall ill, while no one dies Jesherah is certain that something is very wrong and when Weina the same messenger who came for Varana's assistance at the start of this wave of sickness comes to Jesherah with accusations of murder Jesherah knows that she should leave this to the Goddess but is detemined to do what she can to help Weina. She only hopes she can find the murderer before they strike again.
I don't think there is a genre that Ch'ng can't write at this point! Flame of the Spirit was a really quick but fully realized murder mystery.
As the beginning of a series this has a ton of potential. In this first book we get to know Jesherah and Head Priestess Varana, which to be fair I would not have thought the latter would be important until she made a comment at the end of the book. No, I am not saying what the comment was. Jesherah is the perfect character for this type of story, she is clearly curious about everything around her and the loss of life seem to personally offend her. I find both of these personality traits to important when you have a character investigating a murder who is not a police officer or a detective. Establishing the investigators motive is just as important as establishing the murderers. Varana seems to be very similar to Jesherah and I wholeheartedly believe that if Jesherah had more confidence in herself in pursuing these poisonings when speaking with Varana, Varana would have supported her pursuit of finding the killer. That being said I can understand why Jesherah felt the need to keep it to herself, I can't think of very many people who would go to their mentor and be like "Hey look I want to go investigate this murder" especially after it's clear that Jesherah needs to work harder than her peers in turns of her education.
What I really liked about the investigation portion of this is that most of it is focused on tracking down the source of the poison through good old-fashioned research. Given her circumstances Jesherah can't just go out and start interviewing people and all of that stuff that we'd normally see in a murder mystery, so her approach is to gain knowledge about poisonous plants in general. She is methodical in her research which actually becomes a source of world building as she narrows down the part of the world this plant may have come from. It's an absolutely brilliant way to show the readers the world while keeping focused on the mystery itself.
I am looking forward to seeing how this series progresses, I could see it becoming a Matthew Bartholomew type series where we have a healer who unfortunately gets wrapped up in the political machinations of those around her. With Varana backing her up of course much like Michael does in The Matthew Bartholomew Chronicles, because every healer turned investigator needs a Michael!
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