Review: The Knife and the Serpent

The Knife and the Serpent by Tim Pratt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There is an intersection on my Venn diagram of books between "well written" and "not for me," and this book is in it.

Why did I pick it up? Especially considering that the premise of "relative dies suddenly, young woman goes to deal with the estate and discovers she's Special" is a) not a great premise in itself and b) the basis of many, many badly-written books?

Well, it was because this author has used that exact premise before, and elevated it into something wonderful, namely Heirs of Grace . That book has what I call the Glorious Ending, where someone makes a generous choice out of love that averts what has, up to that point, looked like inevitable tragedy.

The problem is, as I said in my review of his short story collection Hart and Boot and Other Stories , "Tim Pratt is an author of two very different aspects. The aspect I encountered first was in his Marla Mason stories (as T.A. Pratt), in which unpleasant people do unpleasant things to other unpleasant people, with a good deal of meaningless and often kinky sex, graphic violence, and occasional drug use." And that is the Pratt of this book, more so than the other, kinder, more joyful and hopeful Pratt that I was looking for. It isn't all the way up against the stop at the dark end of the spectrum; Glenn, though he clearly has issues, isn't a bad person, and Vivy's main issue is that she doubts everything about herself except her ideology, which is the thing she actually should be doubting (in my opinion), and their relationship, while kinky, is loving, but Tamsin is a straight-up Marla Mason character. She's a Hidden Princess, a type of character I'm particularly allergic to, and the only reason that she might look slightly like possibly a bit of a decent character if you stand a long way away and squint in a bad light is because she spends a lot of time standing next to a psychotic murderer, who is much worse. The murderer who killed her grandmother, who raised her. The murderer who she then hired to get revenge on the people who (she is just now learning) wiped out the rest of her family, who she doesn't remember; why she wants revenge on the people she hasn't met who killed her family members that she didn't know, but not, apparently, on the guy who's right there who killed the one family member she did know, may have something to do with the fact that her revenge would also make her rich and powerful. As far as I read, which is a little over halfway, she doesn't spare a single thought for the collateral damage that would be involved on innocent wage slaves who just happen to be in the way.

She also receives a bit of plot help, in the form of a necklace she accidentally finds that enables her to access her family's hidden caches of weapons and wealth.

Glenn and Tamsin are the two first-person viewpoint characters. Glenn often finds it necessary to talk about his and Vivy's BDSM relationship, which is something that I neither grok nor want to grok, and Tamsin is just stone cold. There's also a highly annoying AI called Eddie, balanced to some degree by a more jovial (but still murderous) AI named Swarm.

It's possible, even likely, that this book also has a Glorious Ending in which Glenn (I would bet) does something generous and loving that averts tragedy, but honestly, I don't want to spend the time with these characters that I would have to go through in order to get to that ending, if indeed it is there.

I received a pre-publication version via Netgalley for review.

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