Soon Kinch manages adroitly to get beyond Galva’s natural suspicions and she reluctantly makes a partnership arrangement, realizing that his admitted skills will be of use on the fraught path ahead. Sesta actually lives inside the cat, just as Galva’s war corvid lives in its owner’s secret realm. It’s not that the two, cat and killer, are identical and just alternately swapping forms. By the way, Sesta is concealed in the body of a stray cat that Kinch befriends. What Kinch does not realize at the moment, but will soon learn, is that his bosses, as a failsafe, are assigning a deadly assassin named Sesta to shadow him. The Takers want a part of the action resulting from this mission. Kinch survives the fray, but then receives a surprising assignment when he reports to his Guild masters: he must accompany this scary, humorless and deadly woman, Galva, to the far province of Wostrim, where she intends to rescue a captured princess of her homeland, Ispanthia. She is aided, I might add, by a giant battle crow, which is summoned magically from a kind of interdimensional waiting room whenever needed. (He owes his Guild some large dues, and there will be dire penalties indeed if he can’t pay the next installment.) Unfortunately, Kinch & Company make the mistake of attacking a female warrior who dispatches them all without even breathing hard.
As a bonafide member of the Takers Guild-the official organization of thieves and other miscreants-Kinch is just pursuing his vocation, albeit at a low point in his life.
We meet Kinch on page one when he’s part of a raggle-taggle band of highwaymen. In any case, the allusive name certainly can stand a modern-day repurposing.) (To the best of my awareness, the only famous fictional “Kinch” to date is the POW played by Ivan Dixon in Hogan’s Heroes, and so I don’t think any homage is intended-except insofar as both Kinches are underdog tricksters. It’s a rollicking ride from start to finish (a finish which is fully satisfying, but open-ended towards sequels), and it’s all contoured, colored and made tangible by the unique narrative voice of our anti-hero, Kinch. What he has delivered in this sixth of his tales is a glorious overstuffed “secondary world” fantasy that manages to balance the picaresque mode with that of the (far too often overdone) quest mode the cosmic with the mundane comedy with tragedy the scatalogical with the ethereal and unmitigated selfishness with noble dedication and altruism.
But certainly my enjoyment of his newest, The Blacktongue Thief, will propel me to search out his earlier books. The Blacktongue Thief, Christopher Buehlman ( Tor 978-1250621191, $25.99, 416pp, hc) May 2021.Īuthor of five previous novels, Christopher Buehlman had not previously fallen across my radar screen.
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