The Blacktongue Thief (Blacktongue #1) by Christopher Buehlman is a difficult book to review.
I begin writing this unsure what score I’m going to give. Whilst it has flaws, and isn’t the type of story I’d normally gravitate towards, I enjoyed the experience. As with all my reviews, I’ll be objective about the writing technicalities, and specify where I feel something is valid but not to my taste. My final rating will be an average of my objective score and my personal opinion. Spoilers are signposted.
(Given this book isn’t usually my kind of thing, you may justifiably wonder why I chose to read it. I explain in You’re missing out if you only read your favourite genre(s) – hybrid short story/blogpost).
So what is it?
short_synopsis
A thief who owes his guild a small fortune is told to journey with a knight seeking her queen who’s been missing since a distant city was attacked my giants.
plot
This is the aspect I was most disappointed with.
It feels like a collection of short stories strung together without much to link them beyond the core characters, and with little in the way of consequences from one to the next. The overall arc is often relegated to an afterthought as the characters almost have to remind themselves where they’re going after each (admittedly entertaining) mini-adventure. Road trip-style stories can have this tendency, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the best have a strong throughline that was missing from this.
It’s told in first person past tense, so from the beginning we know our lead survives to the end, which neutralises any sense of danger for him.
There’s no real increase of tension or stakes as we move from one set piece to another, and the finale isn’t a great crescendo, or a tying together of all the numerous threads. I’m not suggesting every book needs these, but as a thriller writer, I prefer a climax with excitement or tension that I felt was missing here.
There’s a reveal at the end that I didn’t foresee, but instead of it making sense of things, it felt unlikely and left me with additional questions (that could be partially answered by a second readthrough).
people
One of the two main strengths of The Blacktongue Thief is the blacktongue thief himself. It’s this main character who tells us his story, and he’s not a conventional hero. It would be going too far to say he’s a thief with a heart of gold, but he’s not Darth Vader either, and he’s more interesting for operating in the shades of grey. Without his wit, snark, scepticism, and foul-mouthed descriptions of the fantasy world around him, this would have been a far less entertaining read.
Unfortunately, everyone else suffers in comparison. Some of the cameos are amusing, but the other main characters felt thin, sometimes bland. The lead is the only character likely to stick in my memory.
MILD SPOILER re character arcs: there wasn’t much of one for any of the characters. No-one learnt a big lesson or grew significantly as a person. This ties in with the plot feeling like a series of unconnected shorts; they could have fed off each other more than they did. END SPOILER.
place
This fantasy world is full of life, and a good job was done of making it feel like there was always something happening somewhere, whether we were around to witness it or not. All the places and creatures were distinct from each other without feeling like they were from different worlds entirely.
The magic system felt a little unstructured, but included a nice touch of some spells being stored in tattoos.
A card game that featured a couple of times was quite well explained, but without a full understanding of all the strategies (having never played it), it was impossible to judge if the tactics used were as clever as we’re led to believe.
prose
For me, the writing style was the other main strength of this book. It’s consistently amusing, and the voice of the main character felt fresh (although I admittedly haven’t read much in this genre). Some fantasy can be pompous or heavy in its effort to be E P I C, but this wasn’t; it was an easy read.
The exposition that’s a necessity to explain a fantasy world and its locations, creatures, society, magic system, etc, was always interesting and never tedious, helped by the general tone and the offbeat outlook of the POV character.
I saw a review that said this was darkly violent. There is some violence, but I wouldn’t describe the descriptions of it as graphic, and having read Alchemised recently (my review and analysis of that is here), it’s certainly not that dark.
My one dislike with the writing style is that it felt one-paced to me; there’s no speeding up for action sequences or slowing down during the breathers. The fights are described to the same depth as everything else, and making the sentences or paragraphs shorter and more punchy would have added welcome shifts in momentum.
conclusion
At time of writing, this has a 4.19 average score on Goodreads; I don’t rate it that highly, but I can’t argue with anyone who enjoyed it more than I did. It’s definitely not bad, but from an author’s perspective, there are things that didn’t work for me, particularly plot-wise.
The fantasy world itself, which is one of the things that might have put me off in the past, wasn’t a negative for me this time. The tone, and the perspective of the main character, meant I enjoyed this on the whole, but I don’t think I’ll continue the series (there’s a prequel book 0, and book 2 is due 2026).
I’d recommend The Blacktongue Thief to fantasy fans who like banter from their main characters, and to anyone who joined the Thieves Guild in Skyrim.
If your preference is for densely plotted pieces with mysteries, twists, and character growth, best look elsewhere.
My score: 3 out of 5
A list of the book reviews posted to my blog is here.
Arrowmaker Books 