Hawk by Steven Brust
I’ve read so many of these things that I couldn’t even tell you. How long has he been doing this series? When it started out, Vlad Taltos was a gritty street thug/assassin, just trying to get by in the dirty city of Adrilahnka (or however you spell that). I loved especially that the stories were all jumbled in time, addressed to a third person, like a man writing his memoirs. In this book, there’s a little of that “addressing the third person” voice, but by this book, he’s not as frightened anymore. He says he’s frightened, but I didn’t believe it.
One of the drawbacks of Vlad Taltos is that he is best friends with some of the most amazing and powerful people in the entire world. He knows the best thief, the best healer, the best sorceress, the best necromancer, the best psychic. He has scads of money and a title in the Empire. He even has a great weapon and a phoenix stone and not one but two poisonous flying psychic familiars. Super heroes need super villians, and Vlad has something he desperately wants–to see his ex-wife and son again without people killing him.
There’s a huge price on his head, and the Jhereg want him dead with a Morganti weapon so that he can’t be resurrected or reborn ever. I can’t even remember what it was that he did that merited such ostracizing, but it doesn’t matter. Suffice it to say that people try to kill him the whole book long. And he mostly shrugs them off. So he hatches a bizarre and convoluted plan, getting his team of friends to provide the myriad unique and oft-times legendary things he needs for the plan. He sets it up the whole book long, meanwhile engaging in friendly “we’re such long-time friends” banter as heroes of long-running series are wont to do.
I suppose it would have maybe been possible to guess what his plan was, if you were such a huge nerd on the series that you understood the difference between psychic and sorcerous and if you happened to know the law books of the Empire of Dragerea, but I don’t, so I just kind of went along with it. Think of it as like Ocean’s Eleven or some other heist, except that only one team member does the actual action, and they don’t tell you what the plan is.
I guess I liked it, though I found the payout to be less than promised, since it took only like a half dozen pages while the rest of the setup was the entire rest of the book. I got a little confused as well. I wished I could remember why the left hand of the Jhereg were mad at him. I thought the utter congeniality of all of Vlad’s friends to be a wasted opportunity for conflict. I do like the character, but this has gone from “fantasy’s Sam Spade” to “Stainless Steel rat tricks the Dragereans.” I like con stories, heist stories, but Brust did the hardboiled novel better. I do commend him for trying.
