I love K J Parker and the 16 ways stuff was great. I liked this one BUT something was missing to make it great for me. Still liked it but i found it hard to pick up and read. Maybe a little too much extrapolation and not enough interaction. Anyway! I'll still be hand selling it and reading the next one.

Thank you to NetGalley and Little Brown Book Group for providing me with a review copy in exchange for an honest review!

'Saevus Corax Deals with the Dead' is a book about a man who runs a business where he clears up battlefields: selling the weapons, armour and belongings that he finds upon those left there. Once we get past the opening, Saevus (Not his real name) starts telling us about his past life - up to the present and how he has found himself in this line of work.

I found the book to be incredibly well written, with a very quirky sense of humour and a plot that is effectively told. Saevus is either one of those characters that you'll find charming and funny, or you'll struggle to align yourself with his 'less than moral' way of life.

I personally found that the text seemed to be quite slow-paced and that unfortunately allowed myself to get disinterested in large parts of the story where there were huge chunks of information and dialogue. Another thing that I found was that the incredibly long chapters often demotivated me from reading as I am someone who often likes to pause at the end of a chapter!

Overall I think 'Saevus Corax Deals with the Dead' is a book that many will find enjoyable with it's great characters, but it slightly let down in it's execution of story telling...

Rating: 3/5

Once Thank you to NetGalley and Little Brown Book Group for providing me with a review copy in exchange for an honest review!

I really disliked this book.

The tale is told by Saevus Corax, a snippy, "witty" antihero, and man with a secret. He is surrounded by an entire cast of cardboard side characters, none of which are remotely developed. The plot, such as it is, zips along at such a pace that nothing is given the time to develop or hold any resonance. Dreadful book.

I'm aware KJ Parker is a popular and prolific author and perhaps his legion of fans will enjoy this book. It's certainly not one I would personally recommend.

Thank you to NetGalley and Orbit publishers for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to Netgalley and Orbit for the ARC !

Saevus Corax was such a funny read, I wasn't expecting it. The way the story is told, as a first person account from Saevus, really worked on him. The humour distilled throughout the book had also a great deal of effect on me, pulling me in all the way, even with the sometimes a bit long chapters or paragraphs. The way the author plaus with storytelling through Saveus was, for my taste, well done with interesting effects. In the same idea, how all characters have their role to play, with twists and twists was interesting.
This is a fantasy without magic, with a rich world, with diverse kind of governments and politics, a lot of countries, rich cultural settings, without falling in some bad too eurocentric gap. Following Saveus and his post-war cleaning was new to me and interesting, before it all came crushing down and we learn more about our hero.
Speaking of him. And is adamant to portray himself as a kind of bad guy. I don't agree with him. Is he a clean hero ? No. But he is human to me, with his faults, his strenghth, his fears and all the in between. I sympathised with him a lot, which greatly helped to enjoy the story.
The story. It has a lot of more or less classic elements to it, but with enough twists (and humour, a british, dry humour) to make it fun and almsost new.
All in all, I enjoyed the read a lot and will absolutely read the next books.

The story of the eponymous Saevus, a mid-twenties leader of a gang of battlefield scavengers. Saevus has a secret history that few people know about - and he's willing to go far to run away from it. The story takes us on a journey of cat-and-mouse where Saevus tries to outrun his past, while it tries to catch up. As this journey progresses we understanding increasingly more about the world our protagonist inhabits (with its idiosyncratic economical model, the political lay of the land, and faintly familiar religious set-up), his history and the lives he lived to get to present day, and, perhaps most intriguingly, his psychology.

This latter point is what I loved most about the story. As the book is written in the first person, the reader is offered a unique insight into the personality inhabiting Saevus, and the events that helped shape it. We discover, for lack of a better world, a narcissistic sociopath. It is bold, refreshing, and hilarious to read a novel written from the perspective of such a protagonist. Despite this, the undercurrent of the psychological disorder creates a persisting tragic undertone, which lends the storytelling a hint of seriousness and unease.

I also liked the writing overall. It was funny and lighthearted, while delivering a grim and dark story. The pace of the story was also spot on - making it difficult to put down, and ensuring that the reader is engaged at every twist and turn. The characters, beyond Saevus, were not super well developed and had some inconsistencies, but, overall, came across well, with an adequate amount of detail.

I can't say there is much I disliked about the book - it serves a very clear purpose of entertainment. It's not memorable, ground-breaking, or emotive. It is worth saying that it's not really a fantasy novel - there is nothing fantastical about it (no magic, dragons, elves, etc). It is a "medieval" adventure story set in an alternative geographical and sociopolitical context. In that sense, it reminded me of Locke Lamora, but with far more hilarity and less grimness.

For me this was a great introduction to the author, and I look forward to reading more of his work - it's easygoing, entertaining, funny, and, most importantly, fun.

I thank Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an early copy of this book, in return for an honest review.

K.J. Parker’s books have settled into a distinctive narrative groove that makes reviewing them difficult, because how you feel about the books largely boils down to how you feel about the formula. If it works for you then you’re going to have a pretty good time — it mostly does for me, I did — and if it doesn’t, you won’t. But as much fun as I had personally, it's fair to hope Parker stretches the template further in the future than he does here. 

So what's the Parker plan? First and foremost, there will be a highly intelligent first person narrator with a complex morality and a ironic, world-weary voice who is also possibly the only fully developed character in the book. He (alas it's always a he) will be thrust into a position of unexpected responsibility and danger, in which he will bounce off a competent, no-nonsense and romantically unavailable female foil, a lunkheaded old friend, and a large cast of stock characters. There will be interesting details about premodern technology and economics cast in a cod-Mediterranean setting, some quite unlikely coincidences, a lot of offscreen deaths, and a few cheeky cultural anachronisms. I suspect Parker would be the first to admit he's working to a pattern, as the steady references to formulaic New Comedy tropes attest. And a bit like Pratchett it's not meant to be all that serious, even as the stakes rise to sometimes dizzying heights.

Saveus Corax Deals With the Dead hits all these notes solidly though not spectacularly, reworking many of the details of Parker's Siege works into a more comic tone. And speaking of comedy the book practically begs for Shakespeare comparisons, plonking our titular playwright-cum-gravedigger into a Renaissance-like setting a thousand years or so after the events of the Siege, while borrowing many of the era's stage conventions. There's mistaken identities, a three-act structure, found nobility and convenient attacks by pirates, though less cross-dressing than one might have expected. It leans perhaps a bit too much on obvious twists in its first third, and like some part-recycled Shakespeare plays its second part hews worryingly close to the plot of an earlier work, How to Rule An Empire And Get Away With It, but the story thankfully (and literally) escapes off into fresh territory again by its end.

Even as it mostly sticks to the formula, Saveus strikes a more individualist stance than some of Parker's most recent novels, with the action driven mainly by Corax's' desperate attempts to escape his own identity rather than the grand sweep of events. There's an interesting comparison to be had with A Practical Guide to Conquering the World, whose narrator was so railroaded by chance and/or destiny that his choices barely seemed to matter at all; in the end both he and Saveus find themselves boxed in, but there's a tantalizing difference in the amount of agency they had in constructing their prisons. Of course, Saveus is a comedy rather than A Practical Guide's unhinged meditation on historical forces, so the narrowing tunnel never quite closes off into tragedy. But Parker's sense of dwindling options, given form in the self-defeating game of Two-Mirrors, gives the proceedings resonance even as we work towards the inevitable happy-ish ending and sequels. 

It'll be interesting to see where Parker goes next, given that he's releasing three Corax books in very short succession. I'm sure the basic formula will still be with us and it's fine to revisit it to kick things off, but I'd hope Parker pushes it farther after this. Like most all Parker heroes, Corax is a charming narrator and I'm happy to spend more time in his wry company, but three stories in a row might grate if he can't find something new to say..

I have thoroughly enjoyed the authors previous book, I love the wit, the sarcasm, the irony and the humanity of the stories that he weaves for us readers, this book is no different, my only caveat being it could have either shorter or edited better, I have already pre ordered this on Audible

AMAZING BOOK! KJ PARKER DOES IT AGAIN! Parker is one of my favourite authors of all time and I loved everything about this book! Amazing characters, plot and writing. Can't wait for the next one.