The Inquisitors' Guild: A collection of three novels from Frosthelm by Dave DobsonMy rating: 0 of 5 stars
This was fun, and well executed, a series of exciting struggles against world-ending or at least city-ending disaster and conspiracy by ethical, brave, determined and capable young investigators.
Sure, it needed another round of editing, not least to get the punctuation of "Inquisitors' Guild" consistent. There's more than one inquisitor, so the apostrophe goes at the end (as per the collection title), but in the text it's consistently wrong in the first book and sometimes right but slightly more often wrong in the second and third books; there's even an instance where there's no apostrophe at all. There are other misplaced apostrophes, too, a few sentences of dialog not punctuated correctly, and a couple of occasions where "aught" (anything) is used where it should be "naught" (nothing). A few misplaced commas, a few more vocabulary glitches, the odd word missing or inserted in a sentence, sometimes a missing past perfect tense. There are plenty of worse-edited books out there, and these are simple fixes. It scores a place on my "deserves-better-editing" shelf, reserved for books that are enjoyable, well-told stories but scruffy in their presentation.
Some other things bugged me slightly and almost, but not quite, dragged it down from the Silver tier of my Best of the Year list (representing a sound piece of work that I enjoyed) to the Bronze tier (representing a book with significant flaws that I still recommend). Rabbits are twice incorrectly referred to as rodents; they were classified as such until the early 20th century, so you could argue for this one on grounds of the level of biological knowledge of the characters, but I suspect it's because of the knowledge of the author. In the first book, the viewpoint character is constantly passing out - it must happen six or seven times, and becomes a bit ridiculous as a way of ending a scene. The chapter titles often refer to, or pun on, something in our world, which pulled me out of immersion in the secondary world. And there's a character in the second book with an accent, whose pronunciation of "tale" and a number of other words that rhyme with it is spelled as "tael" (or whatever), which I personally would pronounce the same as "tale"; I'm not clear what the difference is supposed to be, so rather than helping to make her voice distinctive it's just a distraction, as the representation of accents on the page often is.
In the third book, a couple of outright coincidences are necessary to bring characters together in the same location. (view spoiler)I give the coincidences a pass, though, because they don't wipe out character agency; the characters are all very active in driving the plots of all three books, showing determination and courage and resourcefulness in the service of their ideals, which is exactly the kind of characters I like to read about.
Each book follows different main characters, and the tone is consequently a little different between the three. Boog, the narrator of the second book, is frequently funny in a way that his more serious friend Marten, narrator of the first book, isn't. (They reminded me a little of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser at first, but mostly because of their physicality; the massive Boog is smarter than he looks, and Marten is more wizard than rogue.) All three books involve the loss, or believed loss, or near loss, of friends, mentors, beloveds, and family members, but in the third book I really felt the impact of the loss in a way I didn't in the other two. No doubt this is the author getting better at his craft. He also manages, in the third book, to pull off a narrator who started out unsympathetic and grew on me. This character has a small arc from minor antagonist to minor ally in the first book, but he's still snobbish and self-centred at the start of the third. There is a second viewpoint character in the third book (third-person rather than first-person, for good reasons that the author discusses in an afterword, and it works), and she is admirable from the beginning, making her something of a foil for the other main character, at least at first.
What the books have in common is that powerful, ruthless people are trying to become even more powerful at the expense of ordinary citizens, and the young Inspectors of the Inquisitors' Guild find out about it and are willing to pay any price to put a stop to it. All three involve magical artefacts, too, from ancient times when magic was apparently better understood. These mostly avoid being mere McGuffins; their origins or abilities often play specific roles in the resolution of the plots.
I read a lot of bad fantasy fiction, because I'm willing to take a chance on something that hasn't been through the hype machine and may be a hidden gem. (Honestly, too, most of what comes through the hype machine these days isn't much to my taste.) This trilogy definitely falls on the "hidden gem" side, even though the gem could do with more polishing in places. It's not just a bunch of clichés and tropes inexpertly laid side by side; it's a capable piece of engaging fiction that's had some thought and work put into it, and its characters shine brightly in a dark world.
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