Listen up: you really owe it to yourself to read 15 Vlad Taltos novels, seriously

Listen up: you really owe it to yourself to read 15 Vlad Taltos novels, seriously

Yes, you should all be reading these. "Firstly, these are sprightly novels. Though Brust is spinning a genuinely epic tale of civilization-spanning intrigue, informed by profound insight into politics and power, these are, at core, caper novels about a wisecracking assassin who is also a witch, and whose familiars, a pair of flying venomous lizards called "jhereg," are even funnier than Vlad, the series narrator. Brust is a great political thinker (he may be the person the wags had in mind when they observed that Marxists are the only fantasy writers who get the ratio of lords to vassals right), but he never allows the politics shot through these volumes to get in the way of their astonishing narrative energy. What I'm trying to say is: these are fun to read. But they're not just fun. They're also daring. Each volume does something that Brust has never done before. One book takes the form of annotations to a dry-cleaning bill (seriously!), another is framed around gathering ingredients for a recipe (likewise); another is a trio of multi-POV novellas that interlock in surprising, head-spinning ways. There are whodunnits, war novels, romances, heists, quests... And, with Vallista, now there is a haunted house novel to rival Gormenghast, The Fall of the House of Usher, or Lovecraft's He."