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A review by shookone
Shadow Games by Glen Cook
4.0
This was probably my favorite book in the series so far. The book is just a blast from start to finish. It’s fun to explore this world, it’s fun to see some of the events from the Silver Spike from the Company’s point of view, and it’s fun to watch Croaker be a tricky bastard on and off the battlefield. Getting out of the north and in to a new corner of this world, and using that as an excuse to do some deck clearing and resetting makes this book feel like a breath of fresh air after the last couple entries in the series.
This book is not perfect, the things that I find myself criticizing in Cook’s other books are just as present here. Cook struggles to make anybody besides Croaker and Lady feel like fully formed characters, he can’t let his dead characters stay dead, he can’t write romance for shit, he’ll occasionally say something about women or people of color that probably passed muster back in 1985 or whatever but lands with a thud in 2024. But if you’re reading reviews for the fifth book of this series then you’ve probably already made some kind of peace with those complaints. In light of that I’ll say that this is the fifth Glen Cook book I’ve read, and it is the best Glen Cook book I’ve read, but it is still very much a Glen Cook book in all the good and bad ways that one should expect by now.
This book is not perfect, the things that I find myself criticizing in Cook’s other books are just as present here. Cook struggles to make anybody besides Croaker and Lady feel like fully formed characters, he can’t let his dead characters stay dead, he can’t write romance for shit, he’ll occasionally say something about women or people of color that probably passed muster back in 1985 or whatever but lands with a thud in 2024. But if you’re reading reviews for the fifth book of this series then you’ve probably already made some kind of peace with those complaints. In light of that I’ll say that this is the fifth Glen Cook book I’ve read, and it is the best Glen Cook book I’ve read, but it is still very much a Glen Cook book in all the good and bad ways that one should expect by now.