City of Last Chances

City of Last Chances is a dark fantasy that delivers. Ilmar, the titular city, is a place of grime, crime, oppression, and magic. The usual forces of capitalist exploitation (with demons driving the mills) and a rampant criminal underworld have a special master, the imperial Pallaseen occupiers, whose ideology of “perfecting the world” is an excuse for ongoing conquest and then erasure of local cultures. It’s been three years since Ilmar was conquered, and the city is a tinderbox waiting to explode.

The story dances through multiple points of view. And while this complexity is a common failure of epic fantasy, Tchaikovsky never loses the thread, using each distinct character to show a different part of the city, and a different angle on ambition, intrigue, violence, and idealism.

There are so many characters. I’d have to say my favorites were Blackmane, an Allor (magic foreigner, from another conquered city) sorcerer and pawnbroker, whose constant plots are always a source of amusement, and Ruslav, a soldier for an organized crime faction whose love of violence is tempered by a strange romanticism.

Tchaikovsky teases three major mysteries through the book, and all of them pay off fantastically. First, there’s The Reproach, a district of the city abandoned to a slowly spreading curse that drives people mad, and where wealth and secrets are hidden. Second is the promised revolution, the uprising against the Pallaseen which will see Ilmar free and restored, or at least transformed. And third is Helgrim and his wife. Helgrim is a soldier from another world who came to Ilmar through the Anchorwood, a mysteric passageway between places, and lost his wife along the way.

I’ve seen a lot of other reviews on the other site saying they didn’t like or didn’t finish this book, and I don’t know what these people are reading. City of Last Chances is some of the finest fantasy I’ve read in a long time!