This volume contains books eight and nine (by publication order) of Steven Brust's series about Vlad Taltos, an assassin and crime boss (or, depending on where you are in the timeline, ex-assassin and ex-crime boss) and the strange and interesting fantasy world he lives in. The novels included are:

Dragon: This one is set early in Vlad's history, and sees Vlad briefly joining the army, for reasons that seemed... well, maybe not even all that good at the time, actually. It's enjoyable enough, because Vlad is always a fun character to hang around with, but the story is really, really slight. And I didn't love the way the narrative jumps around in time constantly, telling its story entirely out of order. Brust handles these time shifts deftly enough that they're seldom confusing, which is no small feat when they're happening in the middle of paragraphs, but I can't help thinking, not for the first time, that when Brust tries to get clever with structure, he might be doing it mainly to distract from the deficiencies of the plot.

I did like the way the battle scenes are handled here, though. They work for me in a way such things often don't, largely because they're told from the POV of neophyte soldier Vlad, and he doesn't assume I can follow the action any better than he can.

Issola: For this one, we're back in what we might think of as the present tense of the series. And this one has a very different feel to it, with important, high-stakes stuff going on, involving gods and other mythic entities. There's also a lot exploration of the world's history and mythology, which I found extremely interesting.

I was a little worried at the end, when we were looking at what was shaping up to be an epic confrontation with very few pages left for things to happen in, that it would ultimately fizzle out into something of an anticlimax. But what we got instead was a fascinating, game-changing turn of events that I did not at all expect, right up until the moment where I suddenly did. Now I'm really looking forward to seeing where things go from here on out. ( )

Well written, entertaining, and while obviously part of a larger series, still works all right on its own (though some filling in the odd terms would be nice). Good enough to read cover to cover. ( )