Book Review: Three Parts Dead

Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was very impressed with this book. I picked up the whole series when it was on sale one day on Amazon. Never heard of it before, but I read Patrick Rothfuss’s review of it, and I figured it certainly sounded worth $13 as an experiment. Why not?

So glad I bought it.

As far as fantasies go, it’s a bit of a strange one. Set in a sort of alternate history feeling-ish present day, where magic and gods are real. Or were real. Most of the gods are now dead, usurped by magic users. Probably. The world building unfolds as the story goes on, so it’s not something you necessarily wholly understand right at the beginning of the book, and Gladstone does a fantastic job doling out information through the narrative, as opposed to using information dumps.

Really, it’s the sort of book that makes me jealous as a writer. It’s so well done, I wish I’d been able to do it myself.

Better yet, that’s all just the background for the story. This specific fantasy is more a murder mystery book with a legal slant, that happens to take place in a fantasy world. Pulling off all of that at the same time is incredibly difficult, and this book makes it feel like a breeze.

A god and a judge die the same day. The deaths seem unrelated, but a magic-using lawyer fresh out of school is hired by a law firm to come in and represent the dead god’s priests in an effort to resurrect a zombie version of the god that will continue to at least do most of what the living god had done for his believers. And as she explores the case, she discovers all is not as it seems.

It’s an intriguing book that’s unafraid to shove its readers straight into the deep end. I can definitely see why Rothfuss loved it, and I’m already well into book two. If any of this sounds remotely interesting to you, I encourage you to give this book a shot. Best of all? It’s a stand alone. Yes, it’s part of a sequence of books, but this one exists perfectly all on its lonesome.

Let me know what you think.

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