Booklog 5/2023: Juliet E McKenna: The Thief’s Gamble – Einarinn #1

I love Ms McKenna’s Green Man books so I’ve gone right back to her first published novel from 1999. Livak is a thief and a professional gambler – a chancer by trade – who steals the wrong thing and tries to sell it to the wrong person. She’s drawn into a quest to retrieve magic books and artifacts which have details of magic and history from a little-known Einarinn time period. This involves her special skills, sneaking and lock-picking being to the fore. Her companions in the enterprise are a mage from Hadrumal, a scholar and a soldier, but the are all economical with the kind of information that would makes Livak’s job easier. Two further characters are introduced part way through, and the plot gets interesting with bands of cutthroat yellow-haired invaders relentlessly trying to kill our heroes. This is the first in a series of books that take us deeper into Einarinn. If this is anything to go by, I’ll be reading the rest.