Sunday, May 24, 2015

Blackguards: Tales of Assassins, Mercenaries, and Rogues Review

This book is a collection of short stories from several authors about ... well, everything mentioned in the title (blackguards, assassins, mercenaries, and rogues). Originally funded as a Kickstarter project it can now be found on Ragnarok's website. This is an amazing book with 38 stories each by a different author. Some of the amazing authors include but definitely not limited to David Dalglish, Michael J. Sullivan, and Anthony Ryan. Though some of the authors were unknown to me, each of the stories were phenomenal, forcing me to add several of the authors from this book to my list of author's books I need to read in the future. It is a great book to find an author with a writing style that you like, a story that sounds interesting, or multiple authors. Some of the stories were offshoots from the authors known works, but each story can be read on its own with no prior knowledge of other works. Even though I won't go into great detail, because of the variety of stories, I will mention that most are written in a fantasy world of grit, daggers/swords, and maybe some magic, and the setting that I expected them all to be written in; there were a few written as if they happened in our world. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in stories about assassins, mercenaries, or rogues. This is a great book to find the names of authors who specialize in this genre.