Point of Knives

Melissa Scott

Completed 4/21/2018, Reviewed 4/22/2018

2 stars

I just don’t find these novels of Astreiant very satisfying.  They are police procedurals set in an alternative Renaissance-ish period with mages and necromancers.  I don’t quite know if it’s the police procedural part or the period, but I found this book very boring.  Even the gay relationship in it doesn’t help.  I figure I must be missing something because these books have a lot of fans.  I’m going to keep trudging through them though to get to the book that won the Gaylactic Spectrum award for best novel.  Hopefully, I’ll be so familiar with the universe that I might actually start to like it. 

The book takes place in between the first two, mostly to bridge the gap between the relationship between the two main characters, Nico Rathe and Philip Eslingen.  I really don’t remember the other two books too well, but in the first book, the two of them meet, and in the second book, they are already in a relationship.  In this book, they’ve already had a summer fling and now they are winter-lovers.  I didn’t quite get what that meant, other than having a relationship that lasts only for a season. 

The plot is a straight forward one, as this book is really a novella, only about 120 pages long.  Grandad Steen and Old Steen are both murdered.  They used to be pirates.  Young Steen tries to claim the bodies and the inheritance, but a woman shows up claiming to be Old Steen’s wife.  She lays claim to all Old Steen’s possessions.  Nico, who discovered the bodies, is brought in to investigate.  Philip, who is a knife for the gangster Caiazzo, is also brought in to represent the gangster’s interests.  And all the interest is in a hidden treasure of untaxed foreign gold, that is, buried treasure. 

I don’t know why I didn’t like this book.  I just found it very boring.  Nothing about the case was interesting.  The only parts I liked were the beginning where they find the bodies, and the ending where they catch the murderer.  I think it’s because you know who the murderer is; you’re just waiting for the confrontation.  There’s no real big reveal.  I don’t think it could have had one because it was such a short book. 

I give this book two out of five stars.  Maybe I’m not a fan of police procedurals, but it simply didn’t grip me.  I’m hoping next book, Fairs’ Point is better.  Perhaps it being a longer novel will make it better.