The Book of Jhereg by Steven Brust

If you haven't heard of Steven Brust, don't feel bad.  Feeling bad is a waste of time that could be better spent buying and reading his books.  I recommend you start with The Book of Jhereg, which contains the first three adventures of our hero, Vlad Taltos.  Though, if your wrists are still sore from reading The Way of Kings, you can also buy the first three books separately.  They are: Jhereg, Yendi, and Teckla.

As you may have gathered from my review of Cold Magic, I love good banter.  Brust's Taltos novels are full of it.  Good banter that is.  As with Elliott's Cold Magic, these stories are all told in the first person voice, which doubles the opportunities for the protagonist to say something clever, since s/he (he, in this case) can break the fourth wall and share his cleverness with us, directly.

Vladimir Taltos is a bit warped, but you might be too, if you grew up as the son of a self-hating human in Dragaera.  It is an empire of sorcery and intrigue... for Dragaerans.  For humans, it is mostly a world of drudgery and second or maybe even third-class citizenship.  (The members of the House of Teckla, the serf-caste among the Dragaerans, might edge out most humans for second-class citizenship status.)  Vlad has managed to come up in the world, though.  And he's done it the only way a human can: through the purchase of a baronetcy in the House of Jhereg.

The House of Jhereg is the only Dragaeran House you can get into by any method other than birth.  It also just happens to run almost every criminal enterprise in Dragaera, and it isn't long before Vlad begins a very rapid rise within the organization.  He starts doing "work" and swiftly becomes one of the most feared assassins in Dragaera, eventually coming to control the entire criminal network within his territory of the capital city.

As a Baron of the Jhereg, Vlad can practice Dragaeran sorcery --which a matter of being given access to the power, not merely of legality-- but he has also learned the very different human tradition of magic: He is a witch.  And as a witch, he keeps a familiar in the form of a shoulder-perching winged reptile called a Jhereg.  The Jhereg's name is Loiosh, and he provides help both magical and (more often) mundane.  He's also kind enough to step in (fly in?) whenever Vlad neglects to make a wisecrack.

Somehow, more because of his involvement in the seedy underworld than in spite of it, Vlad manages to befriend some of the most important Dragaerans in the Empire and gets caught up in events far more dangerous than simply killing people for a living.  He also meets a girl.  Who doesn't quite kill him.

And that's to say nothing of a certain undead sorceress, an attempted revolution and the wholly separate threat of a civil war...

The Book of Jhereg is 471 pages of lightning fast, engaging reading that takes on far more than it seems on the surface.  Better still, Brust has already written enough books set in this world to populate a small bookshelf, so this might really be the start of a beautiful relationship.

If you have already heard of Steven Brust, you may be interested to know that Tiassa, the latest installment in the series, is due out in March.