Three Parts Dead

Three Parts Dead is the novel that started Max Gladstones Craft Sequence, which is proving to be one of my all time favorite fantasy series. Gladstone has created one of the most compelling fantasy world Ive encountered and filled it with diverse and well developed characters. Although Three Parts Dead isnt my favorite book in the series, its a good introduction to the world of the Craft Sequence. One of the best ways to describe Three Parts Dead is that its where fantasy meets legal thriller. After all, this is a book containing the phrase pro bono zombies. Tara Abernathy, a recent graduate of the Hidden Schools, has been offered a place at the firm Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, but only if shes able to prove herself in their latest case. Kos, the fire god of Alt Coulumb, has died under mysterious circumstances, and without him the engines that drive the city of four million people will shut down and chaos will ensue. Under the oversight of her new boss, Elayne Kevarian, Tara must work to resurrect Kos and find out how he died in the first place. And its looking like it might be a murder The reason I keep describing this series as magical lawyers is because the world of the Craft Sequence was inspired by the 2008 recession. In short, magic = the economy, gods = corporations, death of gods = bankruptcy, craftsmen/craftswomen = lawyers. With me so far? This unconventional take on fantasy fiction leads to a highly original world and series. Its inventive and imaginative at every turn. More than that, it feels vivid and life like. Theres clearly been lots of thought put into its development, and I love the connections that span different stories in different parts of the world. Theres even two text based games in the style of Choose Your Own Adventure, if youve gotten as obsessed with this world as I have. The originality of the world extends to the protagonists as well, who tend to be equivalent to attorneys or risk assessors or financial investors. They also tend to be diverse in race, gender and sexuality. Tara is clearly described as black, and I love that the mentor type figure, Elayne, was female (especially that she was an older, childless career women, since you dont see many of those depicted positively in SFF). Elayne was probably my favorite character of the book, but I liked the others as well. Tara felt young and sort of naive. Shes ambitious but hasnt yet given up her humanity in exchange for power. Itll be interesting to see how this develops in future books where she leads, as I think shes got a lot of potential character development in front of her. On this second read through of Three Parts Dead, I noticed a lot more of the details of the world. Im pretty sure that its a highly alternate version of our own, so far apart that theres more differences than similarities. Id previously been thinking that Alt Coulumb was somewhere in Europe, but now I think that its somewhere on the east coast of North America. Likewise, the timeline is probably earlier than Id initially thought, with the technology level being more equivalent to late 1800s or early 1900s. Id love to see a map of the series world, but I havent found one so far. While Id probably point to Full Fathom Five or Last First Snow as being my favorite Crafts Sequence novels, Three Parts Dead remains a strong start to the series, and I look forward to returning to Tara and Alt Coulumb in Four Roads Cross. Three Parts Dead is a book Id recommend for anyone looking for well written female characters or original fantasy fiction.

An exquisitely phrased, almost poetic genre cocktail of science fiction, fantasy, and mystery are conveyed within a world of a religious driven science and soul sucking magic known as the Craft. Readers experience this through the characters driving this storys plot; Tara, the capable, inquisitive, and somewhat independent thinking Craftswoman; her master and mentor Elayne Kevarian, a powerful and increasingly less human mistress of the Craft (whom Tara could become if shes not careful); her enemy, the charming, compelling, and powerful Craft professor Alexander Denova; Abelard, lost and devoted acolyte of the machine which serves/makes up his god; and Cat, angry, unfulfilled servant of Justice, who seeks the vampire bite to satisfy her own emptiness. We follow Tara and Abelard through a maze of magic, science, and intrigue as the two of them work together to solve a mystery and a murder. Intelligent, yet brimming with character driven emotion, this story takes us through a fast paced plot which doesnt stint on its worlds development or description. For all of these things, I give this five stars.

This book was written to be literature. It took a paragraph to say he got out of bed and put on his shoes. If you are a wordsmith you will love this book. The author is an artist. The world exquisitely detailed and described over and over. I like to read scifi to be entertained. This book did not do this for me. The third star is because I recognize how beautiful the prose in the book was written. By a third of the way through, I just wanted to get it over with. The repeated angst of the characters and the civilization just got tedious for me. If you are a fan of reading Tolkien or CS Lewis you will love this book.

Very interesting choice of words and I enjoyed the unique perspectives on how characters think and behave. I sort of got the plot of how a god can die (loved the scene where the investigators conjure up a gigantic model of a fallen god and examine it, like a crime scene re-construction) and how there\’s a trial conducted over said downfall. However, it was very convoluted. People do things, like go to a bar, and flee or fight there just because the author tell us. People are attacked, just because it happens. For example, a dead victim is found mutilated in a very odd way and then the investigator blabs made-up rules about how witchcraft can be deduced by the way the victim died (with nothing grounded in reality or logic). Hmm. Magical beings such as craftspeople, guardians, or stone men can be dealt mortal blows which makes you think they\’ve been killed, but… nope. Don\’t know how anyone dies in this book, really. But for a fresh take, and stirring prose, this book is worth reading, if you blink away the plot or any inherent logic.

Id seen Max Gladstones name come up in various places in connection with Seth J Dickinson, whose work I discovered last year and quickly became a huge fan of, so once Id cleared out my reading backlog I decided to give this a try. The premise in a nutshell: Tara Abernathy is a sorceress (or Craftswoman in this settings terminology) whos lucky enough to get offered a job with a prestigious firm of necromancers straight out of university and unlucky enough, once she takes up the offer, to be saddled with the task of resurrecting a dead god in a form acceptable to his worshippers before the city powered and sustained by that god collapses into chaos. Someone in another review called it low fantasy, and while Ive always understood that term to mean fantasy where supernatural elements are rare or non-existent (which this book definitely is not), I can understand why someone would apply the term here: Three Parts Dead has a very pragmatic, unglamorous approach to its fantastic elements and one of those wannabe-noir atmospheres common in fantasy that is a little bit sabotaged by the tying-up of all the injustices the plot addresses at the end. Which isnt a bad thing: given recent events, an optimistic ending involving the beginning of the end of the persecution of an ethnic/religious minority and women defeating a man who exploited and preyed on those beneath him was highly welcome. The nature of gods in this setting, the covenants and pacts they make with their worshippers, makes the book a legal procedural, with the apparently-obligatory shift into a detective/thriller novel once Tara discovers that Kos Everburning did not die of natural causes. Its mostly a fair-play mystery: the magic (or Craft) and the rules of the setting are demonstrated sufficiently clearly for the reader to understand the nature of Kos death, and twists such as whats going on with the gargoyles and what Elayne does in the epilogue are organically derived from whats come before. (Elaynes rationale for her action feels a little contrived, but if Im feeling generous I can accept it as a demonstration of her not-quite-human outlook.) The use of Craft is fairly well-integrated into the settings culture the Blacksuits in particular, people who can become avatars of Justice, trading free will for superpowers and a sense of purpose so strong it borders on addiction, were a particularly cool concept though the visceral, detailed acts of zombie-raising and face-stealing are more impressive than the rest of it, and placing them in the earlier sections front-loads the sense of wonder and leaves the rest of the book a little unbalanced. Still, its a good concept, and the matter-of-fact way in which Craftspeople drift apart from humanity with age is a fun aspect of the setting and provides a nice bit of implicit characterisation for everyone who chooses to study Craft. The characters are good enough for what the book requires of them, though the novice priest Abelard felt like the weak link, and I think thats connected to the occurrence of my pet peeve with many fantasy religions: the cult of Kos Everburning feels very much like Christianity with a new coat of paint. The internal lives of the other major POV characters are all entangled with specific aspects of their world, while Abelard is just dealing with a fairly standard-issue crisis of faith and some limited political intrigue in the Church. Hes less interesting than Tara, Cat, and Elayne, and I wish the blurb talked about Cat and Elayne rather than Abelard because they deserve it more. The settings good and feels original, and, like the characters, is well-drawn enough for what the book requires (this may sound like damning with faint praise, but it genuinely was an enjoyable read). Its no Perdido Street Station, but if youre a big setting nerd I suspect reading the other books in this series will probably allow you to build up a better picture of the world. Gladstones made an effort to give us a gender-equal setting (its not perfect, but its better than many secondary worlds), and in-universe racism is directed against the gargoyles rather than any analogue to real-world ethnicities. Everyone seems to be straight and cis, though Ive heard that improves in later books. In short, its a fun fast-paced thriller with smart, competent characters (barring a certain large brain-fart on the part of one character whose name rhymes with Rabelard), and while it lacks the sheer delight and numinous aspect of something like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, the baroque inventiveness of something by China Mieville, or the strong blend of plot and character of something like The Traitor Baru Cormorant, I think its definitely worth reading if youre into this kind of fantasy. Three-and-a-half stars rounded up to four because I think there\’s promise here.

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