Jame comes to Tai Tastigon. Jame is a woman on the run with gaps in her memory and Tai tastigon is a large city full of gods. So full, that on the particular night of her arrival, there are dead gods wandering the streets, which makes for a disorienting entry for Jame and the reader. After some misadventures that are a bit hard to follow, or at least comprehend, Jame is taken in by the inhabitants of an inn. She becomes an apprentice with the Thief's Guild more or less to pass the winter so she can cross the mountains and join her people who are, by the way, refugees from another world pursued by a Dark Lord eating his way through dimensional realities and opposed by the tripartite god of James' tripartite people with whom they have a strained relationship. Keeping up? Good. Then there's the politics of the Thieves Guild and the upcoming council elections that look set to tear the city apart, the rival inn looking to start a fight, the stalking of a god by a monotheist a bit worried about the profusion of deities that are not hers, a cat with whom she has an empathic connection and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting.

A lot goes on in this crowded, teeming book, and structurally it's all over the place, more like a crime saga about boiling tensions on the mean streets only with, y'know, gods and demons and empathic cats. If you can get past the first chapter without wandering off in dizzy bewilderment, it's a captivating novel bursting with ideas despite its relatively short length. It also turns out to be the first in a long saga of novels not yet completed, but not too far off completion, either. Unique and original, which you can't say about many.