Series: Craft Sequence #1
This book basically has necromantic wizard lawyers dealing with contract law with gods. So Tara Abernathy, a junior associate from Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao whose whole professional future depends on success, gets called in to help with the resurrection of Kos, a recently-deceased god. There is no doubt that Kos will be resurrected (mostly), but how much of His old self He gets to keep depends on how well the Craftsman representing His creditors argues in their favour with respect to the power owed to them against how well Kos’s defence Craftswomen (Tara and her boss, Ms. Kevarian) represent His interests and His blamelessness in His own demise.
So, all in all, it was a kind of fun, kind of weird world that I found interesting. I liked the book, but for some reason my attention kept wandering while I was actually trying to read it. I liked the very final scene: finishing the book off that way helped bump it back up to 3 stars from 2.5 for me. What had dragged the book down to that murky 2.5-star region was the tendency to outright drop a couple pages of mostly unnecessary background information on top of the clumsy way information was parcelled out between the characters in dialogue. And then there were the climatic explanation scenes where our heroes and villains basically explained what had actually happened earlier in the book. You know that kind of explanatory stand-off scene? Yeah.
In spite of some of the clumsiness, I’ll probably check out the sequels eventually to see if they turn out any better. It also looks like they feature different characters, so they’re not strict sequels. Plus I kind of want to get to the third one because I like the title Full Fathom Five.
I did like the thing with the cigarette.