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Notes:
Series is currently on Audible Plus
4 Stars for Narration:
Stefan Rudnicki is always going to be Hari/Caine to me. He was also pretty good as Eddie LaCrosse.
Solid jump into a new series without any cliffhangers. I enjoyed the adventure & getting to know Eddie.
Series is currently on Audible Plus
4 Stars for Narration:
Stefan Rudnicki is always going to be Hari/Caine to me. He was also pretty good as Eddie LaCrosse.
Solid jump into a new series without any cliffhangers. I enjoyed the adventure & getting to know Eddie.
Well, I wasn't sure what to expect when I decided to listen to this. All I knew was that it was written by Alex Bledsoe. I should have known that would be enough.
It's a strange fusion of hard-edged fantasy noir. It's a fantasy setting featuring a private investigator with a noble past he's trying to forget about. There were allusions to fairy and fae, and a "goddess" with what could be considered magic, but essentially this was a detective story.
A very good detective story. I'm going to listen to more of them.
It's a strange fusion of hard-edged fantasy noir. It's a fantasy setting featuring a private investigator with a noble past he's trying to forget about. There were allusions to fairy and fae, and a "goddess" with what could be considered magic, but essentially this was a detective story.
A very good detective story. I'm going to listen to more of them.
Finished up this book last night. I hadn't intended to...sat down after dinner thinking I'd read for an hour, and ended up still there three hours later turning the last page. I've seen it described as "equal parts sword-and-sorcery action/adventure and noir whodunit" and that seems pretty accurate. It's not a great mystery novel...the parts which were foreshadowed were pretty obvious, so the only real surprises are the bits where he gives you no clues in advance. But I didn't care, because the writing style is great and the characters are fun. Well worth the time to read, and I'm going to have to go track down the rest of the series now.
Nice book, I enjoyed the characters and the premise.
Recomended
Recomended
The first in the fantasy Eddie LaCrosse series. Eddie is a sword for hire: finding what needs to be found, killing who needs to be killed. When he is hired by a king to find his missing daughter, he has no idea this case will lead him back into his past. He will have to face his demons and his past failures to help his best friend prove his wife did not kill their infant child. A strange cross between a modern detective story and high fantasy.
adventurous
dark
mysterious
This is one I should have liked, but just didn't.
Eddie LaCrosse is a sword-jockey for hire. A long time ago, he was Baron Edward LaCrosse of Arentia, engaged to marry the Crown Princess Janet and best friends with the Crown Prince Phillip. Bad things intervened and now Eddie stays as far away from Arentia as he can. But friendship commands his return when now King Phillip needs him. Phillip's wife, Rhiannon, is accused of killing and eating their son, the Crown Prince Pridiri. Once Eddie meets the Queen, who has no memory of her life before she met Phillip, he knows she is not guilty. Now all he has to do is prove it. Great swash-buckling with magic and gods walking among us. If you like Glen Cook's Garrett, P.I. books, you will definitely enjoy Eddie LaCrosse as well.
from my blog at https://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2015/05/03/the-sword-edged-blonde-by-alex-bledsoe/
Well, that was a surprise.

by Justin Sweet
(Cover) + (title) = Pass. Except that too many book-world friends read and enjoyed it, so I thought it was worth a try. Still, I cringed: this is a cover made for the e-reader. You know, the picture you don’t want any of your friends to see, because then they’d ask the obvious, and you’d have to explain how the blonde woman with the large bosom and missing legs was witnessing three mysterious men with swords hover around her (obvious much?) were clearly debating which one of them was going to cut off their own legs so that the mad doctor could suture them to her knees instead.
That’s my interpretation, at least.
The cover might have put me in a bad place, because I think around chapter two, I wondered if I was even in the mood to finish. It turns out, the first three chapters are somewhat of a blind, a prelude to the character of Eddie and his cases. Thankfully, the real story takes off after Eddie completes the current commission.
A mix of noir and fantasy, I feel like Bledscoe is still finding his stride, a sort of Terry Pratchett style of noir. Initially, plot, characters, dialogue–all written straight noir trope, plopped down into a generic but well-described fantasy setting. Characters named “Eddie,” “Kenny,” “Rachel,” and “Mike Anders,” talking about military school, an architect girlfriend–it’s more than a bit disconcerting after coming from writers who craft fantasy worlds like travel guides. At least, I assumed it was a tongue-in-cheek style until we start digging into Eddie’s emotional history. As Eddie tracks down the solution to a grisly murder, he winds through his own troubled history.
As an aside: must Bledscoe have named towns Neceda (real name: Necedah), Muscodia (real name: Muscoda) and Boscobel (real name: Boscobel)? These are real places in Wisconsin, and are infinitely distracting to the one twentieth of the U.S. population that lives there. The first two likely reflect corrupted Native American place names, so they don’t particularly set well with the Eddies and Mikes of the naming world. But hey–I guess I can admire the commitment to copying from the modern world.
What saved it for me was the emotional core of the story, the gooey center of self discovery and a sort of wistful romance. There’s also an element of mythology which I rather enjoyed but is incompletely explained for those who like a lot of detail. Taking pains to not spoil, I’ll note that the mythology component explained a lot of me that made potentially problematic females characterization and action more acceptable. The villain was ominous and a decent foil.
When I picked this one up from the library, I thought I was reading a fantasy. It turned into a noir mystery, and then evolved into a hero’s quest for redemption and discovery. And not a legless woman in the bunch. Just goes to show that you can’t judge a book by its cover.
I was writing my review as I read this book, and prepared to recommend it with some caveats, when in the last ten pages, the author pulled out something that pissed me off so badly I would very much like to mail him a half-pound of dead catfish by surface mail in August. I'm giving it three stars, because it's good writing, and perhaps it deserves four, but I'm just not capable of that kind of magnanimity.
First, in its favour, the book is a good example of the noire detective story in a fantasy setting. I've seen it done before, but I don't think I've seen it done better. The protagonist, Eddie LaCrosse, is not so cynical that he is unlikeable, if liking the protagonist is crucial to your enjoyment, as it is to mine. The characterisation is serviceable, if not precisely subtle and multi-layered, and the fantasy world approximately Lankhmar in general tone.
The quotes on the back describe this book as hilarious, but I actually didn't find it all that funny: not as in "that's not funny, I'm offended!" but rather I really only found one or two points where I recognized that humour was supposed to be (and IMO, succeeding at) happening. Probably a sensahuma mismatch, your mileage may vary.
Now, (with vague spoilers) on to my caveats, building to an unhinged rant: the hard-boiled detective novel really is the novel of defensive white man-pain, and don't expect that to change here. Eddie's left a trail of dead women behind him, which is tragic, really. For him, obviously. The funny thing is that Eddie seems to recognize that he's nothing special, and that the women he loved and lost deserved to live as much as he did (if not more); and yet, this is Eddie's novel, and it's littered with dead women who give his backstory a tragic zest.
At point, Eddie needs information from an effeminate homosexual-- who abruptly drops his mannerisms, claims they're a show, and grudgingly gives Eddie the information he needs-- after his partner has been assaulted and his business been threatened. Maybe it wouldn't get to me so much if he wasn't the only queer presence.
A minor annoyance as well: the title. There is only one narratively significant blonde in the book, but nothing makes her particularly 'sword-edged,' and it annoys me that apparently a snappy title is more important than respecting the actual fact of her.
At the end, however, our hero retires to his hole in the wall detective agency, and in walks the identical twin of a woman he lost many years ago. I cannot actually think of a way to make the substitution of one woman for another more insulting. Oh, sure, Eddie muses to himself that "I knew she wasn't Cathy, of course; one woman couldn't replace another," and yet, she walks into his life in the last ten pages of the book, and could not be more obviously signalled to be the woman meant to make him happy if Bledsoe had festooned her with garlands spelling "SHE'S THE ONE." It's one thing to have an epilogue hinting that the protagonist is on the verge of finding romantic happiness, but to use identical twins in this way; rather than a book which acknowledges the differences between individual women, this one brings a woman in and the punch-line is that she's exactly the same. She is doubtless distinct from her twin in many ways, but the book ends, and the reader never hears of it.
First, in its favour, the book is a good example of the noire detective story in a fantasy setting. I've seen it done before, but I don't think I've seen it done better. The protagonist, Eddie LaCrosse, is not so cynical that he is unlikeable, if liking the protagonist is crucial to your enjoyment, as it is to mine. The characterisation is serviceable, if not precisely subtle and multi-layered, and the fantasy world approximately Lankhmar in general tone.
The quotes on the back describe this book as hilarious, but I actually didn't find it all that funny: not as in "that's not funny, I'm offended!" but rather I really only found one or two points where I recognized that humour was supposed to be (and IMO, succeeding at) happening. Probably a sensahuma mismatch, your mileage may vary.
Now, (with vague spoilers) on to my caveats, building to an unhinged rant: the hard-boiled detective novel really is the novel of defensive white man-pain, and don't expect that to change here. Eddie's left a trail of dead women behind him, which is tragic, really. For him, obviously. The funny thing is that Eddie seems to recognize that he's nothing special, and that the women he loved and lost deserved to live as much as he did (if not more); and yet, this is Eddie's novel, and it's littered with dead women who give his backstory a tragic zest.
At point, Eddie needs information from an effeminate homosexual-- who abruptly drops his mannerisms, claims they're a show, and grudgingly gives Eddie the information he needs-- after his partner has been assaulted and his business been threatened. Maybe it wouldn't get to me so much if he wasn't the only queer presence.
A minor annoyance as well: the title. There is only one narratively significant blonde in the book, but nothing makes her particularly 'sword-edged,' and it annoys me that apparently a snappy title is more important than respecting the actual fact of her.
At the end, however, our hero retires to his hole in the wall detective agency, and in walks the identical twin of a woman he lost many years ago. I cannot actually think of a way to make the substitution of one woman for another more insulting. Oh, sure, Eddie muses to himself that "I knew she wasn't Cathy, of course; one woman couldn't replace another," and yet, she walks into his life in the last ten pages of the book, and could not be more obviously signalled to be the woman meant to make him happy if Bledsoe had festooned her with garlands spelling "SHE'S THE ONE." It's one thing to have an epilogue hinting that the protagonist is on the verge of finding romantic happiness, but to use identical twins in this way; rather than a book which acknowledges the differences between individual women, this one brings a woman in and the punch-line is that she's exactly the same. She is doubtless distinct from her twin in many ways, but the book ends, and the reader never hears of it.