Three Parts Dead – Max Gladstone
“Stunningly good. Stupefyingly good.” —Patrick Rothfuss
Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence chronicles the epic struggle to build a just society in a modern fantasy world.
A god has died, and it’s up to Tara, first-year associate in the international necromantic firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, to bring Him back to life before His city falls apart.
Her client is Kos, recently deceased fire god of the city of Alt Coulumb. Without Him, the metropolis’s steam generators will shut down, its trains will cease running, and its four million citizens will riot.
Tara’s job: resurrect Kos before chaos sets in. Her only help: Abelard, a chain-smoking priest of the dead god, who’s having an understandable crisis of faith.
When Tara and Abelard discover that Kos was murdered, they have to make a case in Alt Coulumb’s courts?and their quest for the truth endangers their partnership, their lives, and Alt Coulumb’s slim hope of survival.
Set in a phenomenally built world in which lawyers ride lightning bolts, souls are currency, and cities are powered by the remains of fallen gods, Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence introduces readers to a modern fantasy landscape and an epic struggle to build a just society.
I always look for, but seldom find, books like this: deeply imaginative, fresh, high-concept, and well executed.
A world in which there are people who are a combination of mages and commercial lawyers, investigating the murder of a god through what amounts to a DDOS attack? Brilliance.
The writing was smooth and competent, apart from a few unexpected homonym errors: “sludging” for “trudging” (that may have been a flight of fancy that didn’t quite come off), “flare” for “flair” (possibly likewise, though I doubt it), “clamoured” for “clambered”, and “erstwhile” for I don’t know what. I occasionally felt that the past perfect tense had gone missing where it was needed, too. But then there are lovely sentences like this:
“A gargoyle’s howl, like a poet’s, resounds from spirit to spirit within the walls of a city.”
There’s also some beautiful wryness. “His angular mouth had trapped an approving smile and would not relinquish it, no matter how it struggled.”
Tara, the main character, is a delightfully competent young urban fantasy heroine in a secondary world. I was partly drawn to this book by the cover, which shows a dark-skinned woman who looks dangerous rather than sexy – a rarity in cover art, which would usually whitewash her and put her in a backbreaking pose in too little clothing. The secondary characters have desires and struggles as well, believable and powerful ones, and even character arcs.
Overall, a great success, and I have the second one on my wishlist for when the publishers come to their senses about the price they’re charging for an ebook.
This book review is by Mike Reeves-McMillan and originally appeared on Goodreads.. Mike writes the Gryphon Clerks novels, a series featuring heroic civil servants and engineers doing their best in a difficult world; the Auckland Allies contemporary urban fantasy series, about underpowered magical practitioners stepping up to defend their city when nobody else will; and the Hand of the Trickster sword-and-sorcery series, in which a servant of the trickster god exalts the humble and humbles the exalted. His short stories have appeared in a number of professional and semiprofessional venues, including the Terry Pratchett tribute anthology In Memory.
