Daniel Abraham’s website has A
good synopsis of this series.
It’s projected to be 5 books, of which three have been
published. I finished the third, The Tyrant’s Law last
night.
Each chapter is from the point of view of one of four
characters. I remember finding the first volume, The Dragon’s Path, a
little slow to get into. And then I was muttering that some of
these point-of-view characters are more interesting than others.
In the second book (The
King’s Blood), one of the point-of-view characters (Dawson
Kalliam) has died and been replaced by his wife, Clara. This is
an improvement, in that Clara is more interesting than Dawson.
Also, it removes the security you often feel in a long-running
series that of course they won’t kill off a major character. (At
least without the actor being interview in the newspaper.) George
R. R. Martin did the same thing by killing off Ned Stark, a main
character in The Song of Ice and Fire, at the end of
the first volume.
I (and apparently the Hugo award nominators) have been finding
multi-volume works really interesting these days. I always said I
liked novels better than short stories because you got a lot more
reading for the same work of figuring out who the characters are
and what their problems and relationships are. A multi-volume
series has the same advantage over a novel. Of course, some of
them can become repetitive, but with a good writer like Daniel
Abraham, it hasn’t happened yet in this series. Partly it’s because his gift
for describing places has different places to work on in each
volume. I’m also impressed that he manages to provide both more
character and more plot per page than a lot of writers do.
This series considers a lot of important questions like, “Why
do bankers have power?” and “How do wars get started?” Maybe the
last couple of books will explain how wars get ended, too. I’m
looking forward to the last two volumes.
http://rcm-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0316080705&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0316080683&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0316080772&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
LayMusic.org 