Tor sent me a copy of this to review. Also a copy of the followup, [b:Two Serpents Rise|16059411|Two Serpents Rise (Craft Sequence, #2)|Max Gladstone|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1355469010s/16059411.jpg|21846173].

I was intrigued by the promised mixture of genres...a secondary world, steam-punk, urban/epic fantasy legal thriller.

Wow. Max Gladstone sets up an elaborate magical world based on a few simple rules that allow him to apply contract law to the ebb and flow of life. Into this world he introduces character after character, eventually elevating them to view points, until he has a chorus of motives and desires narrating the tale. The tale they tell is of a murder, politics and love.

The story, stripped of it's eyeball kicks, involves a city scarred by a recent world war trying to modernize while holding onto it's unique cultural heritage. I'm not a student enough of history to come up with a great parallel in our world, but the ideas are powerful. Some institutions remain powerful while others have become a perverted (yet still powerful) shell of their former selves. Imagine your police force and your department of water and power as ex-lovers with PTSD.

By personifying the municipal institutions as gods and having the legal system equate to the magic system in any other fantasy story, a modern police procedural/legal thriller is grafted deftly onto the tropes of fantasy.