R
I really liked the last Kingfisher book I read, so when I saw this one I added it to my list. It didn’t matter that it was book 3 of a series, and yet again I just barely skimmed the blurb. One of these days, I will learn to actually read the thing.
The book follows a paladin, Galen, and a gnole, Earstripe, as they try to figure out who is killing all the bodies that are washing up in town. They enlist the help of a lich-doctor named Piper, who can see the final moments of the corpses. Eventually, they find an eclectic man in a run down estate upstream who has been sending people into a death trap in order to uncover its secrets.
I liked about half of this book. The mystery wasn’t much of a mystery, but I enjoyed how gnoles were introduced as a species and how they interacted with the humans around them. The death trap maze was also in general a lot of fun, as was Piper for the first half of the book. Notably, despite this being book 3, I didn’t feel lost and it all felt pretty contained.
Unfortunately for me the book becomes very horny around the middle while they are trapped in the maze. There were mentions of attraction before this that I was skimming over, but at the half way point it is downright carnal and after that, everything is about this relationship. Everything. Somehow even the third character nearly dying and being unjustly imprisoned is still about this relationship.
That honestly killed the book for me. I finished it, mostly to just get that closure, but I did not enjoy the insistence on pining and making the relationship the central focus of the book. It might be more your style, though.