The King of the Spoil

[Roomsky]

Wooo yeah Crime's back babyyyyyy.

 

The King of the Spoil

 

Wraithbone Phoenix wasn't really my cup of tea, quality notwithstanding. The anthologies are solid, but none but Broken City have really wowed me. With King of the Spoil, we're back to a novel-length mystery plot, and I'm intensely grateful.

 

The books biggest strength, to me, is the cast. They're not terribly groundbreaking, most are archtypes you've seen before, and even Melita the Info-Broker is the depressed and drug-addicted investigator we're used to. But they feel very real; with a few exceptions it doesn't feel like anyone has plot-armour or is some larger-than-life super-person. Everyone is fragile, everyone clearly has their own problems to deal with, and people tend to suddenly drop dead rather than getting any epic send-off. Part-way through the book you realize that one way or another, multiple POVs who you've come to like are going to intersect and only one's likely to survive. The book establishing the cast's fragility creates a wonderful sense of dread for what is to come.

 

The world-building and atmosphere here are excellent as well. Again, every character clearly has their own things going on, but you don't get to see what those are outside the interaction with the POVs. This makes it feel lived in and, despite the core being a very "zoomed-in" story, like it's all part of a vast and ever-moving machine. I'm never left feeling it's convenient that a character's in a particular place at a particular time. The whole thing moves at a good pace, if it's not revealing new and intriguing elements to the web being woven it's fleshing out Varangantua in new and interesting ways. Melita herself is thankfully spared any action she doesn't have a reason to participate in, one particularly large-scale battle happens entirely off-page and for the sake of my attention span, I give great thanks.

 

My issues are minor. There's a POV I love by the end but I feel the book leaves you wondering about their relevance for a bit too long. The story wraps up satisfactorily, but not as satisfyingly as something like Bloodlines because basically everyone gets a tease fort a sequel instead of just letting a few things lie. One major character just up and vanishes without explanation, which I only realized wasn't followed-up on at the end.

 

And, as a personal one, the Spoiler uprising is implied to have been masterminded by a Chaos or Genestealer cult. With how atrocious the conditions on most hiveworlds are, I'd love if a few more weren't motivated by space-Satan and were instead just a byproduct of perfectly mundane cruelty. Though who these masterminds are, specifically, remains ambiguous, so I suppose it could be a subversion if Beer gets another novel.

 

Despite my issues, I thought this was superb. Oh what I'd give to have Horror be so consistently good. Oh what I'd give to have all the Crime novels get fething sequels already, too.

 

9/10

 

My heart says Must Read but Goodreads says To Taste.