K. J. Parker

I almost gave up on this about 45 minutes in, but by the end I absolutely loved it. For some reason I was having a hard time understanding the narrator (his accent) and the story, but then got used to it and everything was fine.

I love what a loveable scoundrel the main character is and how honest he is about it. It's not that he's mean, he just knows his own limitations and often gives in to his baser instincts. I think it works because there's also a core of goodness in him. I also loved show more all the creative ways he came up with to defend the city, though I can see how some people could get bored with the details.

A totally non-traditional medieval war story set on some world other than Earth (which I also loved) but with very Earth-like cultures. Hilarious, daring and creative. Can't wait to read the other books. show less

A snarky, sarcastic novella about the eternal war between demons and angels, demonic possession, and THE PLAN (but does it exist?). There is a lot of philosophy, too, thrown in rather casually. AND Hell has a very impressive bureaucracy - I appreciated this very much :-)
I love K J Parker’s dry humour and skillful world-building, I can’t get enough of his books.

Charmingly idiosyncratic mash of Roman, eastern Roman, and a few other empires, siege against a hoard headed by a barbarian. Orhan, of a race despised by the Robur empire has become through guile and competence colonel of engineers, the only fragment of the army availble to defend a walled port city. He is full of snark and self deprecation while telling of the strategies and devices he deploys against a large army brilliantly if ruthlessly deployed against a city whose citizens have more show more invested in killing each other than the enemy outside the walls.
In this gunpowderless alternate reality the mix of war engines doesn't match any particular historical period and the Romans of either antiquity or middle ages weren't notably racist nor were the former really masters of naval power, ruling the land around the sea but not being happy sailors. Still, this isn't the story of any real then, it's a story for these days. show less

Welcome to the middle book of the tale of Saevus Corax, in which our hard-working, much-put-upon, protagonist is merely trying to get back to what he does best (salvaging battlefields), only to find himself blackmailed into the hunt for a certain MacGuffin that is going to drive the plot for the rest of the book. I think the tone of ironic philosophizing that Parker puts in the mouth of his character is consistently funny, but this is a middle book, and I do think that one is better off show more starting with the first of Corax's adventures; adventure being defined as someone in trouble far away from home. It is to be noted that "home" is the last place our anti-hero wants to be. show less