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A review by songwind
The Crown Conspiracy by Michael J. Sullivan
4.0
This was an enjoyable fantasy adventure that I never would have encountered if I was not a user here on GoodReads.
The book centers around a pair of self-named thieves (though mercenary trouble-shooters might be a better description) who are framed for the murder of the king of the realm. Their only recourse is to accept the aid of the crown princess, who knew of the plot to kill her father and further knows that the two criminals are scapegoats. The kidnap the new king to protect him from the conspirators, and embark upon a journey that sees them tangled up in politics and struggles ancient and new.
The characters are likable and not too heavily steeped in fantasy cliche. The local power structure is nicely complex, which creates a believable political and historical landscape.
There are a few points that disappointed me, but for the most part they are minor. Esrahaddon's dialogue, for instance, was quite clumsy. Verb and subject agreement in the archaic form was haphazard, as was Esrahaddon's mastery of modern idiom. (Quite aside from the fact that after 1000 years, a living language's descendants are practically a whole new language rather than a different dialect.) The timeline for the burning of the Wind abbey was too rushed. 2 days after a fire big enough to burn everything in an abbey not made of stone, without the benefit of modern firefighting techniques, the site would still be too hot to walk around in, much less find things. There were a few more that stuck out to me at the time, but were not important enough to remain in my memory in any detail. All in all, though, these were minor quibbles and more than made up for by the rest of the book.
Hadrian and Royce remind me somewhat forcefully of another pair of thieves whose adventures I enjoy - Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser. The friends from Crown Conspiracy are considerably more moral and prone to acts of kindness than Lankmar's famous pair.
I am looking forward to reading the rest of the series. In particular, I look forward to seeing what Sullivan does with the wizard Esrahaddon, the earl of Chadwick, and the monk Myron.
The book centers around a pair of self-named thieves (though mercenary trouble-shooters might be a better description) who are framed for the murder of the king of the realm. Their only recourse is to accept the aid of the crown princess, who knew of the plot to kill her father and further knows that the two criminals are scapegoats. The kidnap the new king to protect him from the conspirators, and embark upon a journey that sees them tangled up in politics and struggles ancient and new.
The characters are likable and not too heavily steeped in fantasy cliche. The local power structure is nicely complex, which creates a believable political and historical landscape.
There are a few points that disappointed me, but for the most part they are minor. Esrahaddon's dialogue, for instance, was quite clumsy. Verb and subject agreement in the archaic form was haphazard, as was Esrahaddon's mastery of modern idiom. (Quite aside from the fact that after 1000 years, a living language's descendants are practically a whole new language rather than a different dialect.) The timeline for the burning of the Wind abbey was too rushed. 2 days after a fire big enough to burn everything in an abbey not made of stone, without the benefit of modern firefighting techniques, the site would still be too hot to walk around in, much less find things. There were a few more that stuck out to me at the time, but were not important enough to remain in my memory in any detail. All in all, though, these were minor quibbles and more than made up for by the rest of the book.
Hadrian and Royce remind me somewhat forcefully of another pair of thieves whose adventures I enjoy - Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser. The friends from Crown Conspiracy are considerably more moral and prone to acts of kindness than Lankmar's famous pair.
I am looking forward to reading the rest of the series. In particular, I look forward to seeing what Sullivan does with the wizard Esrahaddon, the earl of Chadwick, and the monk Myron.