Steven Brust's "Good Guys," a hardboiled noir urban fantasy, with everything great about Brust on proud display

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/18/roma-vindices-mystici.html

Steven Brust is a literary treasure and his longrunning Vlad Taltos series, now nearing its final volume, is a good example of where his strengths lie: hardboiled plotting, snappy dialog, weirdly realistic and plausible depictions of magic, and a sensitive eye for power relationships and their depiction, all of which are on display in his latest, outstanding novel, Good Guys, about the minimum-wage sorcerers who investigate magical crimes on behalf of a secret society.

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It’s be interesting to see how he handles the problems of a magical/science-fiction detective story.


Cowboy Feng

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I’m looking forward to this but I doubt it can beat the Viscount of Adrilankha books for side-splitting humor.

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Brust doesn’t get nearly enough credit. His prose can be a bit … esoteric at times but that’s what sets him apart. Id love to see new series written by him and co written by John Shirley.
If you’ve never read “To Reign in Hell” I’d suggest finding a copy posthaste.

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Brust is, hands down, one of the few authors I buy just because he wrote it.

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I liked the overall story. I was reminded how good a writer Brust is and I liked the investigation of the moral ambiguity of being a “good guy”. But I found the mix of 1st and 3d person narrative and character POVs to be very odd and, at times, a bit confusing.

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Wait-Wait-Wait… This looks really good but…there’s no audio version of this book! Am I supposed to live like some sort of animal and read the book???

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I just finished it. Very good read. Donovan has more than a bit of Vlad in him.

Brust is always a delight for his action scenes, snappy dialog, and tight caper plots. He’s genuinely one of my favorite authors.

If there is a sequel, it needs some Paarfi!

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Everything needs more Paarfi.I want him to write my obituary. It’ll be 40 pages long and no one will have any idea what the subject is.

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