Will I love Three Parts Dead?

Max Gladstone came out with his latest book in the Craft Wars sequence, Dead Country. It was a while since I read the Craft Sequence, and Dead Country has one of my favorite heroines, Tara Abernathy, so I went back to the beginning and reread his first book in the series. I loved the book when I first read it, and I loved it even more when I reread it this year.

This book is a brilliant sendup of finance masquerading as fantasy. In the book, there are numerous gods all competing for faith (a form of fungible currency… show more.

I’m drawn to fantasy stories set in modern-day analogues because I’m fascinated to see the ways that having magic and monsters as a fact of life would shape a world from the ground up. I’m particularly interested in the impact on more mundane matters like legal contracts and labor disputes. Perhaps no one dives into this topic with as much gusto as Max Gladstone. In Three Parts Dead, we meet necromantic lawyers and witness the legal and practical repercussions of a god’s death. In lesser hands, this could easily slump into tedious details, or the intricacies might be forgotten… show more.