Jarrad Maiers

A good little short story that'll kill an hour. Good fun if you want to explore a little more of the Reckoners series. Not necessary for the series as a whole, but you won't get a lot out of it if you didn't read the first in the series first.

The really impressive thing about this book is the description of the setting. William Gibson once said that all science fiction is really about place, and with that in mind The Dervish House is incredibly well described. There is a flavor to the city that makes you want to explore it on your own...preferably armed. But what didn't hold my attention was most of the characters. I enjoyed the exploits of the young functionally deaf detective with his nano-bot toys, and the retired psychological economist trying to prove to the world that he is still useful, and the young woman searching for a mellified man, but there are other main characters in this book that I just found distracting and annoying. It all came together well in the end, and it was well written, but I found myself bored through a lot of it mainly because I just couldn't get myself to care about many of the major plot twists and characters.

Fun debut. I love fantasy books about people being trained in their craft, especially martial combat. It's a genre of fantasy that I really enjoy, as its far more pleasant than reliving my own high school memories. Age of Assassins doesn't quite fit the genre because by the time the protagonist arrives in his training, he's already been trained as an assassin for years and is just pretending to be a squire-student, but it has the same feel.