Review: The Knave of Secrets

The Knave of Secrets by Alex Livingston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In a setting where everyone in several different cultures is obsessed with gambling games, this book focuses on a crew of crooked gamblers who end up in the position to maybe do some good.

There are a number of viewpoint characters, including two of the crew but also several other players in the complicated plotting and counter-plotting; at times I found myself wishing for a diagram, which I suspect the author has probably drawn. There's a kind of cold war going on between two powerful nations, an Empire and a Queendom; a third nation, an island where the story is mostly set, is coming increasingly under the influence of the Empire. Because landowning grants voting rights there, and because immigrants from the Empire tend to be prosperous and often buy land, the Parliament is heading for a "tipping point" where it may vote to become part of the Empire rather than remaining independent, which will shift the balance of power between the superpowers. Meanwhile, a supposedly apolitical order of wizards (to which two of the gambling crew used to belong) are keeping secrets that could upset the balance in a different way.

All of this sets the plot in motion, as one of the crew wins a game where people play for secrets, and somehow (it's never explained how) the man he beat knew the wizards' secret and gambled with it. They decide they have to try to keep the current détente between the Empire and the Queendom and the independence of their island, and prevent a war from starting, using their gambling abilities and some unreliable magic.

(view spoiler)[Unfortunately, they're ill equipped for this task and flail about a good bit, and the author has to rather obviously plot armour them against being assassinated. Someone who has every reason to kill them off and has already demonstrated that he is physically and morally capable of doing so (by killing several minor characters) simply decides not to for no discernable reason, and they also face no consequences from a run-in with a gang boss whose threats got them into the game in the first place; he just vanishes from the board and is never mentioned again. Later, the crew leader wins a game he probably shouldn't have been able to win, reveals the wizards' secret, and appeals to someone to do something she probably can't do (given that she is not really in favour with her superiors) to prevent that revelation from starting a war. (hide spoiler)]

The issues in those spoiler tags, and my difficulty in following the overly convoluted plot at times, took this book down to the bronze tier of my annual Best-Of list, but it does have a good many strengths and shows potential. I particularly enjoyed the worldbuilding, the different games and the feeling of deep and rich cultures. I also found the idea of a nation (one of the two superpowers) where the wealthy gain access to formal power by funding public works to be an interesting one, though I'm not sure how it would arise or how long it would be enforced in reality.

I received a pre-publication version from Netgalley, which needs some work for typos (mostly words missing, added, duplicated, or mistyped) and the occasional vocabulary glitch, but is otherwise largely sound.

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