Saevus Corax Deals with the Dead

3.5 stars, Metaphorosis Reviews

Summary
Saevus Corax, a man of dubious antecedents, is a professional battlefield gleaner. Except that a whole host of people seem to be coming after him for reasons in his past, and it's causing a vexatious amount of trouble.

Review
I've been whining for a while about K. J. Parker, but I keep picking up his books. At last, however, I feel I may be reaching my satiation point; during most of my reading of this book, I honestly didn't care whether I picked it up or not. Only during the last 50 pages or so did I develop a real interest in the protagonist.

Parker's books are individually very well constructed, written, and intriguing. Taken as a whole, however, it becomes ever more clear that he's using a single template with a slightly different hue each time. I didn't feel like picking the book up because I knew, with high confidence (and a mixed metaphor), almost precisely what the beats would be and where they would come in – and I was right.

The gimmick is what's intriguing in each variant of the story – here, that Saevus Corax runs a crew of battlefield scavengers. Parker does his research and presents each profession or circumstance convincingly. It's hard to escape the idea, however, that each of his protagonists is pretty much the same. They downplay their skills, take the least obvious course, insist on always defeating expectations (to the extent that it's self-defeating, because that is the expectation), and, as often as not, turn out to be someone else. That's pretty much the case here – improbable strategies with ‘unexpected' results, often due to extremely long-range tactics that work out against all odds. The similarity of protagonists is not helped by the fairly generic, chartless politics of Parker's world. Here, I acknowledge, we do get mentions of his greatest hits of nations and empires (the Robur, the Aram Chantat, the Sisters, the Knights), albeit with no real sense of how they fit together – whether this island and Empire and City are the same as the island or Empire or City mentioned in this, that, or the other story. It allows Parker a lot of flexibility and it was fun for a while, but now it's just too much sameness – like a dozen slightly different versions of the Lord of the Rings, each with the Elf, the Dwarf, the Wizard, the Warrior, the Ranger, the leader Hobbit, the servant Hobbit, etc.

To be fair – and somewhat annoyingly – in the final pages of the book, title character Saevus Corax does develop a tiny bit, at last providing something of an emotional foundation for the story. Is that enough for me to pick up the next book in the trilogy? I don't know, honestly. If I get it for free, maybe, but I'm starting to wonder whether I'd be just as well served by just picking up one of Parker's older books and rereading that. Aside from the gimmick, it's hard to see what would be particularly different.

I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review.>