dead cat tail assassins

[ursula]

The heroine of P. Djèlí Clark's The Dead Cat Tail Assassins is the undead assassin Eveen, nicknamed "The Eviscerator." Perhaps I should have recognized this was inevitable, but I was startled to find that the end of the book

involves Eveen...

involves Eveen and a newfound comrade torturing the antagonist to death.

The antagonist is a villain of the grandest sort, so if you're someone who finds the notion of retribution emotionally satisfying, maybe this will work for you. I'm not. I'm willing to read about torture, and even willing to read about protagonists who engage in torture, but an authorial stance that frames it as just is a hard no for me, even in stylized adventure stories. I would have set the book down unfinished if I hadn't already been on the last page.

Until that bloodthirsty denouement, Dead Cat Tail Assassins is a fun, snappy, fantasy adventure with a mix of wizardly and divine double-crossing. In some ways, the reading experience feels the way I imagine it must have felt to discover Steven Brust's Jhereg in the '80s: the braided timelines, the banter, the novelty of a fantasy setting that has no investment in mythologizing England. I missed some of the richness of the contrast between history and fantasy in Clark's Cairo stories, but I loved the late-book faceoff between divine powers and the booklong tug-of-war between Eveen and her intended target, who looks oddly like a younger version of herself.

(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC.)

Comments

[octahedrite]

I loved Clark's Cairo stories; is this one set in Britain, then? Either way looking forward to reading it 👀

[ursula]

Oh, I guess that was unclear! It's a secondary world that's using medieval Africa as inspiration--some of the same feeling as Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi.

[octahedrite]

Awesome!