2025 Reading Challenge 38 Jhereg
Here we go, a fantasy book - hopefully a lighter read after the challenging ones. I believe I picked Jhereg after a recommendation for the best implementation of a detective novel within a high fantasy setting. En Garde!
Jhereg feels like being invited to dinner only to find the host serving up the family jewels instead of a meal. It aims for brisk and witty; what it delivers is a steady diet of deep lore with the occasional smirk.
Vlad Taltos, our guide, is an assassin, small-time crime lord, and consummate heel. He’s meant to be sardonic and clever, but mostly comes across as smug, entitled and cynical. The book clearly wants us to admire his guile; I found myself wishing someone would smash a fist into his face, smearing that twirly moustache all over it. He’s a protagonist you follow not because you like him, but because you’re stuck with him.
The real star, of course, is the world. Brust clearly delights in his creation, and he’s determined you should too. Pages linger and delight over the structure of noble houses, their arguments, and the finer points of criminal etiquette. It’s intricate, coherent, and ambitious. It’s also, whisper it, a bit boring to have lots of these diversions. If lore is your jam, you’ll be in paradise. If not, the pace feels glacial, the plot a thread running through endless appendices.
To be fair, there are flashes of life. Brust’s prose can snap when it isn’t weighed down, and Loiosh, Vlad’s Jhereg familiar, provides welcome comic relief, even if it gets repetitive. The noir-PI-meets-fantasy conceit is clever, and every so often, you catch sight of the sharp novel buried within the maze of digressions.
For readers who thrive on deep lore and don’t mind a hero you’d happily punch and can live with some of the leering eighties attitudes, it may be ideal. For me, it’s one to acknowledge, not to love.
I gave the book 5.0 out of 10.
TTRPG Thoughts:
Steven Brust’s Jhereg and Kevin Kulp’s Swords of the Serpentine (SotS) tread remarkably similar ground: both are less about orcs in dungeons and more about knives in the back, whispered favours, and the city as a character in itself. If you squint, Vlad Taltos could be dropped into Eversink tomorrow, sliding neatly into its webs of corruption, politics, and sharp daggers in the dark.
Where Jhereg provides a literary template — a cynical assassin balancing obligations between crime lords and nobility — SotS gives you the mechanics to play that story. Its GUMSHOE-based system treats reputation, allegiances, and skulduggery as real things to manipulate and bounce off of, exactly the sort of levers Brust’s characters are constantly pulling. In SotS, it matters who owes you, who fears you, and who’s quietly waiting for you to fail. That’s very much at the heart of Vlad.
The big difference lies in focus: Jhereg is a single, tightly told caper about one assassin, while SotS empowers a party to shape (or destabilise) the entire city. Brust gives you the flavour — nobles, guilds, sorcery as business transaction — and SotS hands you the dice to go and play in it.
As I write this, I’ve almost convinced myself to hack the city of Adrilankha and characters like Vlad Taltos into Eversink and Swords of the Serpentine, almost.