The Girl on the Mantlepiece

So, I recently finished reading Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora, largely on the strength of the recommendation of the esteemed Mr. Hite. An excellent book, certainly among the top five of the year so far. But there are a few things about which to talk.

One should not that, unlike, as I am told, the UK version of the book, the US version does not contain, anywhere on the cover or the text, the phrase 'Book one of the Gentlemen Bastards Sequence' or anything of the like. Thus, I came to the text under the mistaken belief that it was going to be an entirely self-contained novel, rather then the beginning of a series. If I had had that knowledge, my problem might have been less pronounced, I'll admit.

But even in book one of seven, introducing a character by telling the reader repeatedly that she is extremely special, and following that up with indications that she is currently a continent away that are persistent enough to make anyone suspect dramatic irony at work is a TolstoyanChekovian Gun on the Mantlepiece, creating dramatic expectations that are confounded in an unsatisfying manner when it refuses to go off by the third act.

A couple of other points:

I found it more than a little bit cute when Locke and company actually believed that they had been the first to invent The Bank Examiner. C'mon, next he'll say Chains was the first person to walk into a pawnshop with an antique violin...(Being familiar with other con-artistry based SF; The Golden Globe and American Gods, for example, I figured that instantly and so the strange pacing of that chapter didn't really help with the tension level.)

And I got an interesting, China Meville-ish vibe out of the book's major antagonists-a militant socialist and a magical-biotech-animal-grafter. Which in turn suggest an interesting metatextual reading of the meaning of their fates...

(At least the socialists in this book are of the unsophisticated, not-particularly-different-from-the-politics-of-a-French-villiage-athiest sort. The bizarre anachronism of Meville's fairly sophisticated socialism in a world with neither a liberal enlightenment tradition nor revolutionary experiences of either the American or French varieties, let along both, has always bothered me. Almost as much as George R. R. Martin's belief that introducing reliable contraception into a late medieval society wouldn't make any social changes at all happen...)