I also found the love story part of things a little annoying it's one of those cases where it feels like the characters fall for each other solely because the author pointed at them and ordered them to. Although maybe it's more because it is a prequel, so you kind of know how things are going to come out for Vlad in the end. I think that might be an artifact of it being a re-read for me, though, meaning that even if I didn't remember any of the details, it still felt a little too familiar. Again, it's an entertaining enough read, although the plot (convoluted as it is) didn't hold my attention quite as well as I might have hoped. Yendi: This is a prequel to the first book, and features a mob war that turns out to have connections to something bigger, as well as the story of how Vlad met his wife. Brust also uses some common fantasy tropes in ways that don't feel at all cliched, and makes a character who could be very flat and/or unlikable quite sympathetic and human. Both the character and the world are decently interesting, and right from the beginning it feel like they both have a full-fledged history behind them. And it does a good job of introducing the series.

The plot is rather slight, and I'm not sure the gimmick used to resolve things is set up quite as well as it could be. Jhereg: In this one, Vlad is hired to kill a very important target on a very strict time schedule, but the person has holed up somewhere where he can't be taken out without dire consequences. The three short novels included here are: Although it may not have been strictly necessary, as they're largely designed to all stand alone. Well, I've decided to go back to it now, and I figured a refresher on the first three books was in order. I first read these about ten years ago, enjoyed them, and had every intention of continuing on with the series, but for some reason I never did. (Well, I'm not sure 'crime lord' is how he would think of it. Opportunities in that society are limited for people like him, but he's managed to do well for himself as an assassin and a crime lord. Vlad is a human living in a society controlled by the vaguely elf-like Dragaerans. This is an omnibus collection of the first three books - by publication date, not by internal chronology - in Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series.

Yendi steven brust