by Terrance Mc Arthur

Details on how to win a copy of Wicked Bronze Ambition at the end of this post.

The city of Tunfair in Glen Cook’s Wicked Bronze Ambition doesn’t exist–it can’t! There are sorceresses, rat-people, the semi-ogrish, dead creatures that are too busy to be dead and some humans who are just human.

Garrett is a former Royal Marine, and he’s a private investigator. He has fought and thought his way through more than a dozen books in the series, but now he is up against his greatest challenge–in-laws.

Garrett is about to marry his beloved, Strafa Algarda, but her family wants him to stop a deadly tournament–that nobody’s supposed to know about, but a lot of people do–that drags in a dozen children of high-ranking families, slaughtering them until the winner acquires all their powers and becomes a demigod. The games never run smoothly and soon there are mass-produced swords, a floating girl that looks sort of like Shirley Temple, piles of knocked-out strangers, a missing giant crossbow, the hard-to-stop Vicious Min, a costume shop, not-too-Secret Police, a lot of walking, carriage rides and horses, and men of the cloth (Church officials, not costumers).

There are a lot of characters from the thirteen previous books and they all seem to want to be in this story, along with a new set of creatures/people. It’s hard to manage them all in your brain. On top of that, Garrett’s partner, a dead creature who communicates mentally, needs to interview everybody who has any contact with other characters before he goes into one of his periods of hibernation. With all the “this and that’s” and the others happening in a wisecracking noir atmosphere mixed with some madcap comedy, I almost expected someone to say, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

This is definitely a case where knowing the earlier books makes it easier to keep things straight, but this is still an amazing journey into the Tunfair universe. The twists and turns keep you guessing, but things will fall into place a few hours after you finish Wicked Bronze Ambition. You’ll suddenly say, “That’s why that happened!” Of course, people will stare at you, because you’ll probably be at work at the time, so try to look innocent.

Check out more fantasy & horror book reviews in our fantasy and fangs section.

To enter to win a copy of Wicked Bronze Ambition, simply email KRL at krlcontests@gmail[dot]com by replacing the [dot] with a period, and with the subject line “Bronze,” or comment on this article. A winner will be chosen August 31, 2013. U.S. residents only.

Use this link to purchase the book & a portion goes to help keep KRL going:

Terrance V. Mc Arthur is a California-born, Valley-raised librarian/entertainer/writer. He lives in Sanger, four blocks from the library, with his wife, his daughter, and a spinster cat.