In this third Thieves’ World anthology, the stories really complement each other and those from the earlier anthologies to bring to life a wonderful fantasy setting, the decadent, decaying town of Sanctuary.
Because the stories are written by different authors, there is unevenness in style, but this is more than compensated by the detail created by multiple narrators who are the leading characters in their stories, but also appear as minor characters or references in other stories.
Although lacking the humour of Lankhmar or Discworld, they are otherwise my favourite “swords and sorcery” books. And this anthology includes more of Andrew J Offutt’s Shadowspawn and Janet Morris’ A Man and his God, which is a satisfying closing story, bursting with further tales to be told, in Storm Season.

Another reread from nearly 40 years ago. ( )

This review is written with a GPL 3.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at Bookstooge.booklikes.blogspot.wordpress.leafmarks.com & Bookstooge's Reviews on the Road Facebook Group by Bookstooge's Exalted Permission. Title: Shadows of Sanctuary Series: Thieves' World Editor: Robert Asprin Rating: of 5 Battle Axes Genre: SFF Pages: 338 Format: OCR Scan Synopsis: Further stories from the city of Sanctuary, recently taken over by the Empire. It just keeps going lower into the gutter. My Thoughts: Janet Morris writes several of these stories and she seems to be a huge fan of the M/M mercenary idea. What a disgusting pervert. This was going downhill anyway, but that pushed this into the "won't be reading any more of this series" territory. And it was becoming more about the Empire as much as Sanctuary. I don't want to read about some grubby Empire and some disgusting mercenaries. " ( )

The Thieves World ongoing shared world series continues with #3. Some new authors this time, Vonda McIntyre, Paxson and Cherryh join the regulars. This is still high quality fantasy with a coherent story line, though by this point it is starting to wander off at times. ( )

The 3rd in the series. I was right, I enjoyed the 3rd more than the 2nd, because I was familiar with the characters. Must look for the first one. ( )

A group of authors develop a world that's dark and nasty and set their imaginations free and oh man do they do nasty things to their characters. As an exploration of a dark world it's interesting but in some ways I really didn't engage with any of the characters.

Now that I'm older I'm seeing more of the character flaws, it's interesting to see what people do in a shared world, I re-read this from a Borrowbox copy. ( )