The Book of Jhereg by Steven Brust
🟊🟊🟊🟊
This is a compilation of the first three books in a series of high fantasy novels about an assassin named Vlad Taltos. The first and third compiled books (Jhereg and Teckla) were excellent, the second (Yendi) was merely good, but overall I enjoyed them and plan to read more.
Generically, the books read like crime/detective novels wrapped in a high fantasy style that was very common in the 80's. That older style has both good and bad features. On the downside, the books lean in to the tendency of 80's fantasy to wallow around in "power fantasy" that seems kind of puerile forty years on: the setting is almost ludicrously high magic with all of the arbitrary complication that entails, and the plots involve a seemingly endless proliferation of super powerful magic weapons.
But the books also feature some other older sci fi/fantasy features and tropes that I deeply miss in modern fiction. For example the core of each of the books is a heist or mystery revolving around hyper-competent protagonists "doing what they do best," which I adore, but is much less common in modern genre fiction. Similarly, each of the novels is around 200 pages, and are carefully written so that they are almost entirely self-contained. I deeply miss the standalone 200-page fantasy novel, a form that seems to have been all but abandoned in favor of the modern long-form ensemble fantasy novel.
Stylistically, the prose is crisp and workmanlike, but Brust isn't a poet; his prose style isn't particularly memorable in either a good or a bad way. The main strengths of the books are in the dense plotting, the rich characterization, and the diversity of real-world themes he manages to meaningfully explore in what are notionally stories about sorcerer assassins. The books allegorically explore, among other things, racial prejudice, class conflict, crime politics, and what it means to love someone even when you disagree with them on something foundational.
These books are highly recommended, although readers with a low tolerance for the more "fantastical" elements of high fantasy novels might want to give them a pass.