07/10/2017
Lucas (the Doc Voodoo series) opens the Fifth Ward series with a gritty tale set in the fantasy city of Yenara, where humans, orcs, elves, and dwarves coexist in an uneasy détente. Rem, a human new to the city, wakes up in a dungeon cell after a tavern brawl. Almost out of money, he is given the option to earn his freedom by serving in the city watch for the neighborhood called the Fifth Ward, where he’s assigned to a partner, Torval, a maul-wielding dwarf. On their first night together, they stumble across a corpse that turns out to be Torval’s absent partner, Freygaf. Together, human and dwarf set out to find who is responsible for Freygaf’s death and search for a rich man’s missing daughter, battling assassins and using magic spells to get to the truth. Lovelorn Rem and family man Torval get along almost too well; there are echoes of Fritz Leiber’s classic Fafhrd and Gray Mouser tales in their relationship. The complicated rules governing Yenara are reminiscent of Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos adventures. Readers who enjoy this combination of high and low fantasy will eagerly await Rem and Torval’s return for a second tour of duty. (July)This review has been corrected; an earlier version misstated that the watch, not the neighborhood, was called the fifth ward.
No matter how intricate the descriptions in many fantasy novels, they often overlook the less-sexy aspects of world-building. Few authors, for example, explore how a large fantasy city processes its sewage. And most fantasy stories craft a universe where a pitched swordfight in the middle of the day has no consequences—because most writers don’t think […]
For nearly two decades, Jim Killen has served as the science fiction and fantasy book buyer for Barnes & Noble. Every month on Tor.com and the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, Jim shares his curated list of the month’s can’t-miss new SFF releases.
We don’t know about you, but there are still dozens of 2016 books on our teetering mountain of books we really, really want to read, provided we manage to live long enough. Which is why we approach the massive post below with equal parts excitement and trepidation. We asked sci-fi and fantasy editors from all the […]