The book is subtitled “Three adventures of Vlad Taltos”. Vlad is an assassin and a minor crime boss, with an intelligent mini-dragon as a pet.
The stories take place in a world where humans are a minor race, and the dominant people are almost-human Dragaerans, who look down on humans. Dragaerans are near-immortal, powerful wizards. Humans are puny.
Quite an interesting world which becomes more complex and more complicated as we learn more about it. Brust throws in more and more stuff as the pages go by: reincarnation, a complex social/political system, two different kinds of magic, etc. One important part of magic is that it can revive the dead. This obviously makes an assassin’s job somewhat different.
As far as the story goes, the Taltos books are mystery stories, really, rather than traditional fantasy. There are numerous assassinations but the focus is not on the act itself but on the planning or the foiling of a plot to kill someone. The style is not the usual fantasy style, either. It is relaxed and modern, with lots of humour. An Amazon reviewer compared it to Futurama and that’s quite apt.
There is a lot of dialogue and a lot of elaborate plot, yet very little description. I guess that’s in keeping with the hard-boiled mystery style, but I thought Brust pushed it a bit too far. I have no idea what the world or the people look like, apart from a very few basic descriptions. (Dragaerans are tall and slim; humans have mustaches.)
The story itself was not entirely believable. First of all there’s Vlad’s relationships with some of the most powerful Dragaerans. Dragaerans are said to generally view humans as worthless scum, and yet here some lords actually chat to Vlad and go out of their way to help him. An explanation is given at some point but not a particularly satisfactory one.
Then, more fundamentally, there’s the matter of assassinations, and making a living as an assassin, and becoming what’s described as a first-class assassin, in a world where assassinations are illegal and rare. On the one hand Brust implies that there’s a whole business of assassination, with standard fees and general procedures to be followed when ordering one. On the other hand Vlad mentions, at some point, that he has 42 assassinations under his belt, and that was (I think) over a period of some 5 to 10 years. So he only kills a person once every few months. That doesn’t add up. It’s too little to give him a chance to become good at it, and too little to make an assassination a normal occurrence.
On the whole the book stands out from the general mass of fantasy books: quite entertaining, memorable, never boring. But it’s not well enough written to stand with the best of them (the repetitive dialogue quirks became annoying after a while). Good for a rainy weekend or two.
I can’t help but be amused at your choice of this book, following your complaint about SF series in an earlier post. ;) Yet it does have the advantage that each book of the series can stand on its own, without requiring the reader to have knowledge of previous books (and in fact, the series wasn’t written in chronological order).
Jhereg first drew me to the Brust’s Vlad Taltos series, and to my mind, the series improves as it goes along — the descriptions become richer, and his character development deepens as Brust’s experience as a writer grows. It’s definitely one of my favorite series, although I would be hard-pressed to name a favorite book within the series.
Hey, I’ve never promised consistency of opinion! ;)
Hmm, if you say the series improves then I might buy the next book(s) as well. I wasn’t entirely sure after this one. It felt good while I was reading it, but didn’t leave me with an immediate craving for more.