The Penitent Damned

Yes!
Thief-girl uses her push and pull powers to jump around on buildings, but with a different taste than [b:Mistborn|68428|Mistborn The Final Empire (Mistborn, #1)|Brandon Sanderson|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1421302300s/68428.jpg|66322]. The action part is sandwiched within the ministry parts elegantly and deliciously. *This is not a story about food.

I will definitely be checking this series out!

Alex is a very talented master thief--extremely talented. She has some very useful magic to assist her in her work, with the added advantage that everyone knows magic and magic workers are gone from the world.

Also gone from the world are the Dark Priests who hunted down magic users, so Alex is safe at least from that danger, right?

But not all is as Alex thinks it is, and perhaps she should have listened to the misgivings of her senior partner. Maybe visiting Vordan to steal from the Duke Orlanko really was a bad idea, no matter how good the price.

This is a nicely developed story. Alex is competent, plausible, and her magic is not anything close to a "get out of jail free" card. The Duke and his secret police are convincingly show more dangerous.

The bonus extra is that this is a prequel story to the Shadow Campaigns series, and it's available free at the link in its Goodreads description.

Recommended. show less

The Penitent Damned is a short prequel to The Thousand Names in Django Wexler’s The Shadow Campaigns series. It’s available for free here.

Duke Orlanko learns that a famous thief is planning to steal something valuable from him, so he assigns somebody to try to prevent the theft. The story is primarily about what happens when the thief makes the attempt.

This short story wasn’t nearly as entertaining to me as the first novel, so I wouldn’t recommend starting with this if only for that reason. It was mildly entertaining, but nothing special. Story-wise it could probably be appreciated on its own, but it makes reference to a couple names and terms that are more meaningful within the context of the first novel. Also there’s a show more reference at the end that nobody would get if they hadn’t read the first novel.

A couple spoiler comments: Alex, the thief, was kind of annoying to me because of her arrogance. I also thought her ability was too over-powered – swinging across buildings, slowing herself from a fall, drilling holes in objects or people, cutting through locks or people… But it didn’t do her much good in the end, so maybe I should retract that complaint in retrospect. show less

everything of course depends on what the author does with the environment. Who were we introduced to? if it was the arch-villain then there is hope, if not then not.

See review at Book Haunt:
https://bookhaunt.com/2017/08/11/the-penitent-damned-the-shadow-campaigns-0-5-by...