The cover says it all! A sexy, strong, fierce woman of color with natural hair and it's a different take on steampunk. What more could a black geek chick possibly ask for?

How do I love this book? \m/

The reason I haven''t written a full review is because I'm still trying to put into words just how freaking awesome this book is! The fact that gods can and do die here is such an interesting concept and begs the question of just who created who.

When your god has died, who ya gonna call? Why, the thaumaturgical firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, of course.

At least that's what the priesthood of Alt Coulumb does when their fire deity, Kos, snuffs it (a rather embarrassing turn of events for a god billed as "Kos the Everburning"). Without his power driving the steam engines of the city, Alt Coulumb will eventually come to a grinding halt, so it is up to Tara Abernathy (the newest recruit of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao) to unravel the cir More...

CAUTION: Long Review

Three Dead Parts defied my expectation. I took a risk on this seemingly boring book and it paid off!

I thought it was Urban Fantasy because of the blurb and cover.... Okay, mostly because of the cover. And technically it wouldn't be inaccurate to say it is because there were vampires and Craftsman (mages), a kick-ass heroine and a chain-smoking hero among many parts of the book.

However, the book was Fantasy. TDP was set in a completely different world where gods and godly Craf More...

This may surprise my faithful review followers, but this book should have been the sequel, not the first (or only). Why? Read on...

Fifty years ago there were the God Wars (over what is not quite clear) and when the dust settled, all the gods were dead (or reformed, or something) with the exception of Alt Coulumb, still ruled by Kos Everburning (a fire god). Kos' lover, Seril (a moon goddess... I think) was remade into Justice and her Guardians (aka gargoyles) banished. Instead, Justice has Black More...

THREE PARTS DEAD is sort of a mix between steampunk, religion (though not Western religion) and legal thriller, and it manages to do each well. There are gargoyles, magicians (call them Craftsmen), vampires, and gods, so this hits all the major fantasy buttons trending recently. Sometimes the mix of POVs is a little confusing and the world, while superbly built, is dropped on the reader without a lot of explanation. On one hand, yay, no info-dump! On the other hand, whoa, where's the info? Most More...

How should I put this? This book was like a delicious stew.

Ingredients:
- Magic
- Religion
- Science
- Mystery
- Conspiracy
- Courtroom drama
- Steam-punk

I love stories that mix magic and religion together. Glad to see that Horns of Ruin isn't the only book to take up that mantle.

I thought all the characters had interesting quirks and the world building was terrific; really hope there is another book coming from this universe.

I'm a big stickler for the rules behind a fantasy world making logical sense More...

Looking at the cover one would presume that this book is featuring a dystopian sci-fi--at least that's what I thought, but if you read the summary it’ll say different. As long as the story is good enough to read that’s all that matters, but that wasn’t the case for me this time. The only question I have to ask is “why is it the books I hope to enjoy turn out to be a flop?" Within the first portions of the story I had to re-read some of the narration because…I’m just going to get to the point 1)I More...

Magic lawyers. No, not lawyers who go to court over magic, but lawyers who have magic and use it to make contracts. Gods who are real. Gargoyles. Vampires. Necromancy. A murder mystery. Trying to explain everything this novel has and is just makes my head spin.

So...maybe I should start at the beginning.

Tara is a young Craftswoman (i.e., magic lawyer type) who since being kicked out of the Hidden Schools has floundered about purposeless. Until Elayne Kevarian hires her to help on a case her fir More...

An inventive and unusual take on the fantasy genre. We meet our heroine, Tara after she's literally been thrown out of her craft school (craft=more-or-less-magic). After briefly licking her wounds back at her parents, she is offered a job with one of the great Craft firms - imagine if a bunch of powerful magicians mated with some crafty lawyers. Her new boss and Tara end up in the city of Alt Coulumb, where they've been hired by the Church of Kos Everburning to represent them in the recent death More...

I avoided this book for a while because it looked so very generic urban fantasy-esque from the cover, and I'm tired of kick-butt heroines busting up vampires or werewolves or zombies or what-have-you. (Or having torrid angsty love affairs with them.) But a book review blog insisted on calling it a "high fantasy legal thriller" and specifically called out the deceptiveness of the cover, so I took a chance.

I almost didn't make it past the beginning. Trains, cigarettes, business cards...what kind o More...

Wow. What a thrill ride Three Parts Dead is! We have one dead God. One faith-scarred novice priest. One student of the Hidden Schools who’s “graduated” and then thrown out. I’m amazed she survived. Actually I’m amazed at this world that Gladstone built, and the characters he’s thrown into this world.

When Tara Abernathy left her small sleepy village to learn to craft, she never expected that she’d end up in Alt Coulumb, investigating the circumstances surrounding a God’s death, and getting mired More...

Review courtesy of Dark Faerie Tales

Quick & Dirty: An intensely creative world and descriptive writing make Three Parts Dead a must read for fantasy fans.

Opening Sentence: God wasn’t answering tonight.

The Review:

Humans have mastered the powers of a god. Craftsmen and women train for years to harness their soulstuff (powers). Tara Abernathy has been given an early graduation from the Hidden Schools and thrown back to earth to for an unknown reason (which is later revealed but I’m not spoiling More...

Three Parts Dead is outside of our genre, as it falls squarely into the category of high fantasy, rather than urban fantasy, though it does include mages, vampires and gargoyles. In an alternate earth there are Gods which are worshiped for their ability to provide for human society. Essentially a legal contract is formed with a God in which they agree to provide certain services for worship. The crafts people are in charge in writing these contracts and ensuring that the letter of the law is fol More...

tl;dr review: If you enjoy Brandon Sanderson, you will also highly enjoy this book.

Full review:

This book contains one of the more richly colorful worlds I have ever enjoyed in a book, and the fact that it comes from a first novel makes it even more noteworthy. I'm not really a fan of steampunk fiction, since I have seen far too many examples of it done poorly than not, but I love fantasy stories that involve interactions between gods and humans, especially when there's some balance between the p More...

The first thing I have to say about this book is wow.

From the 1st page to the last I was absolutely riveted. Even now having finished the book, the first thing I did after reading the last page was look up the authors website and see when the next book he’s writing is coming out. If that’s not a sign of a good book, I don’t know what is.

Three Parts Dead has a fantastic combination of characters. All the characters are compromised, all them are filled with histories filled with shadows, and yet y More...

Other than a distinct lack of detail in what "craft" is/is not capable of this was a nice intro to a new series. I liked the "urban" feel without trying to make the world remotely like Earth and thought the little details (Carriage horses that understand directions like taxi drivers? There has got to be a good back story behind that idea.). I could see this series either focusing on the city where our heroine ends up or jumping a head a bit to her leaving the city and starting someplace new. I More...

"She laughed as fell..." Because she's a boss!

Max Gladstone's novel is set in a world so different from ours; people called craftsman wield the power of God's. God's love, war, and trade their power, and their devout love them all the more. Vampires roam free selling their wares to those addicted to their bite and driverless carriages pulled by horse's ferry customer's to and fro the giant city of Alt Coulumb- a much easier task if the fare speaks horse.

Tara, a recent "graduate" of the hidden s More...

This is an interesting fantasy book that breaks away from 'high fantasy' and instead crafts a mystery story in a world where magic is based predominantly on contract law; gods increase their power by lending their power to others and getting a reasonable rate of return, and churches are charged with accounting the various obligations of their gods. Just several decades prior, humans had figured out a way to use their own magic skills to fight with the gods on near-equal terms; now an uneasy peac More...

I really enjoyed this book, a book with a ton of good buzz and reviews, but it also finally helped me understand why I struggle with urban fantasy so much.

Here's the deal: Tara is a necromancing craftsman who is essentially investigating a murder and ends up embroiled in a rather elaborate situation involving cults, gods, gargoyles, and all sorts of bad stuff. It starts to fall on her very quickly to make things right before it's too late.

The book is a fantasy, and a good one at that. The issue, More...

This book is well written and interesting. Tara was likable, as were the other character’s. However, it is hard to keep up with what’s going on. This book reads like a sequel. A whole world is developed and its is not explained to us at all. There are countries, but no map for us to see. There are gods, but no explantation of who they are, what pantheon they belong to, etc. There was a God War, but it is never gone into, we only see the aftermath. There are creature’s, some we are familiar with, More...

“The eyes have burst. The tongue, here, well. The brain, missing out of the back of the skull. The spine you see, and the heart is gone entirely." She looked up at the Blacksuit. "Did you really think it was possible he died of natural causes?”
These are strange days. We have had to widen the definition of the word "natural" six times in the last decade...

This is a hard to categorize book. It's partly a murder mystery, although the victim is a god (which you would think might rule out a LOT of s More...

This book is sort of a UF, of the whodunit variety, but set in an alternate world instead of our own. It has an interesting premise - investigating the death of a god - and some good ideas, but it gets bogged down with, well, just too much stuff and not great writing.

For the parts I liked:

I liked the philosophy behind how gods are made, the sort of circular system with faith feeding the god, and the god, getting stronger, then making bargains and rewarding the faithful, so both are sort of depen More...

I picked up this book because it was 0n a "steampunk" list and I'd never heard of it before.

Well, it isn't exactly what I'd call "steampunk." It doesn't have that Victorian England retro-sensibility with alternate history resulting in cool, steam-powered machines. Neither is it Urban Fantasy such as the title and cover seems to suggest.

What this books is, is a fantasy world peopled with gargoyles, magic-wielders and gods. The main god in the story, Kos the Everburning, just happens to use his go More...

I received this ARC from Tor via Goodreads.

I have read many advance release copies of books in recent months. A numbers have been stinkers. I confess, I was jaded to get this one, wondering if it would be yet another disappointing.

Oooooh no.

This book blew me away. Not only is it one of the best books I have read this year, I found myself becoming increasingly more distraught as it neared the end. I kept forcing myself to stick my bookmark in so I could pause and savor the pages instead of rushin More...

I admit, I picked up this book because it had a knife-weilding dark-skinned female in a business suit on the cover. I give kudos to the artist and the author for making me want to know how mystic sigils and knives and business suits all worked together, all from glancing at the cover.

This book was my first steampunk-fantasy-legal thriller, and it was awesome. I liked the magic system (yay for actual consequences to your actions, your magic hurting you, and power having to come from somewhere!) I More...

I read and discussed this one with a couple friends, and though all three of us have very different reading personalities, we pretty much all felt the same way about this book: It had potential, but was ultimately just a mess.

There was just too much going on in this book, and not nearly enough story to support it. It felt manic, like the author tried to cram every cool idea he had into it, but didn't explain anything in a way that felt natural or even coherent. Everything was just presented, wo More...

Vampires and gargoyles and lawyers, oh my!

Three Parts Dead is a whodunit of the murder of a god. In it run amok addicts of magic and law, sagely chain-smoking priests, an antagonist you want to strangle (in a good way), and a protagonist who weaves starlight into magic. In this universe of floating universities, the mages over time turn into a perfection of petrified bone, and the mage kings are the most distinguished of giant skeletons. The protagonist happens to be a young mage, still with her More...

My Review: 8 - Excellent

What an utterly fascinating yet deceptive book. I love the cover to pieces, but the cover led me to assume I'd be getting a standard kick-assitude urban fantasy. That was still my assumption after reading the premise, but now that I've sunk my teeth into this book? Oh, it's so not THAT. It's urban fantasy only in that it's a fantasy story in an urban setting. Imagine N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms mixed with her The Killing Moon, and then imagine she's writi More...

mon avis en Français

my English review

The first thing that comes to my mind now that I've finished this book, it’s its originality. Yes it is a completely unique story, and there is, I believe, no other stronger word to describe this novel. Indeed, I think we can immediately see it with the synopsis. It is, I confess, what pushed me to read it. Then there are not a lot of books featuring gods and I was intrigued to learn more about them.

We discover in this first volume, Tara, a young woman who ha More...

Kos Everburning has died. The city of Alt Coulumb and the surrounding areas have long relied on the old God for power and heat, so his death would have terrible results for everyone. Tara Abernathy has been hired by Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao to work the case. If they can find the cause of Kos's death, they can possibly bring him back. Though she is helped by one of Kos's Novices and one of the city's Blacksuits, Tara has limited time to unravel the cause behind the God's demise and when they f More...