If you have ever played D&D, please read this series. Kingfisher clearly understands the genre and the archetypes of the five man-band (well, three men, one woman, one gnole, and a little bit of dead demon) and, in a style I can almost call Pratchettian, does a send-up of the whole thing by taking it very seriously. The only reason I waited so long to make my husband read it was because he would not have been pleased if I'd left him with the cliffhanger at the end of book one.