“Repent, lest your sins seek you out.” Alex Verus may have repented his training as a dark mage, but the sins of his past refuse to stay buried. A gang of adepts (magic-users with limited powers) are after him and this time it’s personal. The start of the book finds Verus in a rare state of quiet domesticity, with Anne and Variam still in residence and Sonder and Luna visiting regularly. No-one has tried to kill or recruit him for months - you know it can’t last... Sure enough, soon there is an adept reconnoitring his flat and a Council Keeper (policeman / enforcer) is quizzing him about his former master Richard Drakh, who vanished ten years ago but who is now rumoured to be returning. Then he is attacked in a casino by a whole group of young adepts, is stabbed and is only saved from death by Anne’s life magic. And he doesn’t even know why... As the story unfolds, it transpires that the leader of the adepts is the younger brother of a girl who Alex helped kidnap while still apprenticed to Drakh. Verus’s protestations that he subsequently attempted to free her and didn’t know her fate, having escaped while she was still a prisoner, cut no ice - her brother wants him dead. There are further attacks and Verus’s flat is bombed. In an attempt to resolve matters before someone gets killed, he tries to find out the eventual fate of the girl (although he has strong suspicions). This leads him to investigate Rachel/Deleo’s past through the medium of Elsewhere : an approach not without risk. We, and he, learn a lot about what she has done and what has turned the girl he remembered into the unstable hair-triggered killer of the present. There is still a lot of violence in this book - something I have commented on negatively before. However, this time it is central to the plot, being centred on Alex and his past, and obtrudes less on to the outside world. It is certainly less gratuitous and OTT than in some of the previous books. Verus tries to resolve things peacefully, but in the end he isn’t left much choice in the matter. He worries that his actions mean that he is being dragged back towards becoming what he fled from in the first place - another Richard Drakh. However, by the end of the book he has had, if not precisely an epiphany, at least an indication of a possible change of direction in his life. We don’t learn much new about the world of magic in “Chosen”. Instead, it mainly concentrates on interactions between characters we already know and, of course, exploring more of Alex’s and Deleo’s back stories. Being essentially set in London, with a couple of Gated trips to Drakh’s old mansion, it avoids the “geographically challenged” aspects which were a weakness of “Taken”. Overall, it is probably a better book than its predecessor, if distinctly more introverted. The hints of a possible new direction for Verus at the end bode well for his character’s development in future books. On the other hand, the teaser / cliff-hanger right at the end probably indicates that he will be living in “interesting times” for a while longer.