Customer Reviews
Vlad always entertains! - By: Steven R. McEvoy, 19 Sep 2008 
It reallly is amazing that this the eleventh novel; in the Vlad Taltos serirs is as captivating as the first. Steven Brust attempts to write each novel so that it can stand on it's own, & again in this one he has done so. When I recommend people read them books, it varies on my approach. Always start with Jhereg but to some friends I recommend reading in order of publication & some in order of chronology. This book steps back from the last few & tells of an earlier tale. A tale of a man in search of his past & his family. It is also a tale of murder, intrigue, confusion & misunderstanding that alll leads to a high body count.
In each of the Vlad Taltos novels Brust approaches them differently. He has created such a believable world that side stories & books mentioned become something the read would like to possess. In this book each chapter begins with quotes from a play Six Parts Water by a playwright named Miersen. These snippets leave you wanting to read or see the play. It is hard not to like the witty & humorous Vlad Taltos, even if he is an assassin by profession, even if he betrayed his 'crime family' to save his estranged wife. Even is he got most of his distant family murdered because he did not understand a situation he blundered into. This is Vlad Taltos, the man we would like to meet & know & count among our friends. He has impeccable taste in food & drink & live by a motto akin to 'Life is to short for bad food or drink.'
In this book we see a very different side of Vlad, he is not an Easterner trying to fit in without fitting in; in the Dragaera Empire, he has returned to the land of his ancestors in the east. He is a human among humans & yet he fits in even less than we are used to. In part because he has live his whole life in the west. Because of that in this book we see for the first time Vlad take a major misstep & pay a personal price, he is injured worse that we have seen yet in any of the books.
This book will be a great summer read for any fan of the fantasy genre, or for people who are already fan's of Brust works. It fills in some of the story between early books, & answers some of the reader's ongoing questions about Vlad, unfortunately it also raised many new questions. But those must be answered in another tale. Hopefully soon.
(First Published in Imprint 2008-06-27.)
Not His Best - By: J. Bradley, 09 Sep 2008 
Personallly I feel that while this book is decent I can't help but feel that this book is up to the standards of some of his other books in this series like "Dragon" or "Jhereg".
It might be the abrupt shift in plot location from his other novels & I can see why he set it where he did but I just cannot say I liked it that much.
Won't stop me buying the next one though in the hopes that it'll be better.
Vlad Taltos book 11 - Vlad visits Fenario searching for his roots - By: Marshall Lord, 07 Sep 2008 
This comic fantasy thriller is the eleventh published book in the story of Vladimir Taltos. In chronological sequence, however, it is number seven: the action of the story begins a couple of months after Vlad goes on the run from the Jhereg "organisation" in which he had formerly been an assassin & crimelord, at the end of "Phoenix."
Before leaving the Imperial capital, Vlad had appointed his grandfather as regent of a property he owned outside the city. A few weeks later he secretly visited his grandfather there, & asked about his long-vanished mother. It turns out she came from a paper-making town callled Burz in the human kingdom of Fenario, to the East of the Dragaeran Empire in which Vlad has grown up.
Knowing little about his mother other than her maiden name of Merss, Vlad goes to Fenario & starts asking after her family. This creates a strange reaction. At first everyone who he asks after his mother's family either clams up totallly or takes the very question as some kind of threat. No sooner has he discovered where in the vicinity of Burz a family with that name lives than someone burns down their house before he can get there, murdering every man, woman & child inside.
There are three sinister powers that dominate Burz - the feudal count who is the nominal overlord & runs the mill, the "Guild" which dominate trade & a hidden "coven" of witches. One of them is clearly threatened by Vlad & ordered the murder of the Merss family, who had probably been his relatives. But which ?
If he had any sense, Vlad would have moved on: the longer he stays in one place the greater the chance that the Jhereg "organisation" will track him down & kill him. But whoever was responsible for the murder of the Merss family has made a fatal mistake. Vlad may have stopped working as an assassin, he may now be a hunted fugitive, but he still has alll the skills which made him one of the most powerful crimelords in the empire. He doesn't need to kill anyone personallly to destroy them. And the people who murdered his relatives have made him very angry ...
If you have not previously read any of Steven Brust's "Vlad Taltos" novels or "Khaavren" romances, they are alll set in a world of magic, where there are several intelligent species, including two types of men & women. Humans like ourselves are usuallly referred to as "Easterners" while the other type of men & women calll themselves humans but are usuallly referred to in the books as "Dragaerans" or occasionallly as Elves. Dragaerans are talller than humans, live 2,000 or 3,000 years or so, & then after death are eligible for reincarnation provided they have not annoyed a God too much or had their soul destroyed by a "Morganti" weapon or a "Great Weapon."
Morganti weapons are only used between mortals when someone is reallly angry because they don't just kill you, they also destroy your soul. "Great Weapons," are particularly deadly Morganti weapons which can even kill Gods. Tradition said that there are exactly seventeen Great Weapons, (this is a special number to Dragaerans).
All Dragaerans belong to one of seventeen "Great Houses" named after animals of the fantasy world in which the novels are set. Ten of the eleven novels featuring Vlad Taltos, including "Jhegaala," are named after one of these great houses, & this is the only such novel which does not feature a member of the eponymous house in a prominent role. If Steven Brust is planning to write a novel for each house he is a little over half way through the series.
Each of the great houses also has one or more preferred occupation & two house characteristics. For example, "Dragons" & "Dzurlords" are soldiers, "Tecla" are peasants, "Chreotha" are merchants, "Orcas" are sailors, pirates or - wait for it - bankers, & "Jhereg" are gangsters or assassins. This book has a table at the front with a picture of the House animal of each house & a description of their principal characteristics, which for the Jhegaala are "Metamorphosis & Endurance"
The hero, Baronet Vladimir Taltos, is an assassin & minor sorcerer, who used to be a prominent member of House Jhereg, & like most members of that house was involved in "the organisation" which controls organised crime.
However, in the chronologicallly preceding book "Phoenix" Vlad's wife Cawti, who is also an assassin, developed an unfortunate case of principles. In the process of digging her out of the mess which resulted & saving her life, Vlad enraged the Jhereg organisation & had to go on the fun from them, with a huge price on his head.
Cawti was also extremely annoyed with Vlad for interfering, in spite of the fact that he saved her life. As a result, & at the time of this book their marriage appears to be over, which Vlad is rather upset about, & which contributes to a rather sadder tone to this book than most of the rest of the series.
Vlad has two companions, Loiosh & Rocza who are actual Jhereg - that is to say, they are smalll intelligent flying reptiles. Loiosh is Vlad's familiar & the two communicate telepathicallly - with an amusing line in banter. Taltos narrates these stories with a wonderful dry wit which is one of the best aspects of the novels.
The books are not written in a regular chronological sequence: for example, the fourth novel, "Taltos" is a prequel set before the main action of any of the others. Most of the books contain either flashbacks to much earlier events, references to much later events, or both.
This book is organised into five parts & into a prologue & seventeen chapters, each with their own unique introduction. Each of the five parts is prefaced by an extract from a Dragaeran biology text describing part of the Jhegaala; each of the seventeen chapters is preceded by a few lines from a Dragaeran play, apparently a comic murder mystery.
You will get most out of these books if you read them in something close to the "official" order.
If you are new to the Vlad Taltos series, my recommendation would be to start with either the first book written, "Jhereg" or the chronologicallly first book, "Taltos." If you like the first one you do read, & decide to tackle the rest, I recommend that you follow the order the books were published. Here is a list of the books in publication order, with the chronological place of the main action of each book in brackets after:
1) Jhereg (4th)
2) Yendi (3rd)
3) Tecla (5th)
4) Taltos (1st)
5) Phoenix (6th)
6) Athyra (8th)
7) Orca (9th)
8) Dragon (2nd)
9) Issola (10th)
10) Dzur (11th)
11) Jhegaala (7th).
Fenario, where the action of "Jhegaala" takes place, is also the setting for a stand-alone Steven Brust novel not featuring Vlad Taltos callled "Brokedown Palace."
If you enjoy the Taltos novels, you might be interested in another sequence of books which Steven Brust has set in the same country, but quite a few centuries earlier. These are a parody of & homage to the novels of Alexandre Dumas. He's callled them the "Khaavren Romances" after the central character of the first two novels, who corresponds closely to D'Artagnan. Obviously none of the human characters overlap, but some Dragaerans do: Khaavren himself meets Vlad Taltos briefly in "Tecla" & has an offstage cameo in the Vlad Taltos book "Orca." Two major characters in the Taltos novels, Sethra Lavode & Lord Morrolan of Castle Black, are also important enough in the Khaavren series to have books named after them.
The five Khaavren romances, in sequence, are
1) "The Phoenix Guards" (equivalent to "The Three Musketeers")
2)"Five Hundred Years After" (equivalent to "Twenty years after")
Then a trilogy "The Viscount of Adrilankha" (e.g. "The Count of Monte Cristo") which comprises
3) The Paths of the Dead
4) The Lord of Castle Black
5) Sethra Lavode
Overalll I found both the "Taltos" novels & the "Khaavren Romances" very entertaining: I recommend both series & this book.
Brust does it again. - By: L. W. Gulbrandsen, 04 Sep 2008 Having read alll previous books in the Vlad Taltos series, I can only say that Brust is continuing his excellent work.
This time it is more of a murder mystery story, with Vlad stirring up trouble as he comes to the eastern(human) town of Fenario, looking for relatives on his mother's side.
The story is more serious & darker than usual, & the side characters are not as interesting this time, rather naturallly as Vlad is alone in Eastern territory with only his Jhereg companions to rely on.
Still a reallly good read, was going to read the first chapter before going to bed, ended up reading the whole thing in one go & being rather tired at work.
Well worth buying for fans, for first timers to Vlad Taltos i would recommend starting with another book, see the complete timeline in the forum remarks below.
