An excellent follow on from the Fallen Blade. Top quality fantasy that is full of subtlety and intrigue.

It concerns the recently widowed Lady Giulietta, who has the German and Byzantine empires wanting their preferred suitors to marry her and control Venice. The fly in the ointment is Tycho, a lethal assassin, but afraid of the day, who detests the city, but starts to love Lady Giulietta with a blind passion.

The climax of the book is a battle between the German and Byzantine empires with Tycho making a bond and eliminating one of the suitors.

Cannot wait for the final book. ( )

The 2nd Act of the 'Assassini' sees Tycho raised up as a knight, as just as swiftly cast down, as Grimwood's alternate Venice is coverted by both the German and Byzantine empires. ( )

http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2016/09/review-of-outcast-blade-by-jon.html ( )

History and fantasy is one of my favourite combinations. With great characters and intricate plots involving royalty and empires this is a good way to fill the time waiting for the next 'A Song of Ice and Fire' book. ( )

This is a strange book to pin down. It is clearly a middle volume but does not suffer from middle volume disease in that with zero knowledge of the first book the story is enough fun to be worth the read yet in reverse the data dumps from book 1 are handled lightly enough not to be a bother. It is nominally an alternate history but the POD's are elusive and almost beside the point - the book would work roughly as well if the history was standard as little is made of the alterations. It has paranormals and magic but they are essentially props to the plot. What we have is a quite baroque presentation of a noir romance pseudo-historical thriller. Sounds nasty but the writing and characterization are so good it doesn't matter. You have star crossed romances, high political intrigue, several bows to Shakespeare and Marlowe with several more bows to Raymond Chandler and Quentin Tarantino. It works so well I look eagerly forward to the next volume and have bought two books from other series by the same author. If you like Gibson, Zelazney [especially Nine Princes in Amber], Walter John Williams or any serious cyber or noir you should like this although there is no cyber and it is not exactly noir. However those are the touchstones I would use to describe it. Or from a different direction Hunter Thompson. Not high literary art but wonderful twisted genre fun. ( )