The Palace Job

Ocean’s 11 meets fantasy adventure. On the plus side, heists, heists, heists! and some moments of truly funny sardonic wit.

On the minus side is, well, everything else about the book manages average. The characters are nicely differentiated in ability, but two-dimensional (except for the villain, who is occasionally delightfully ambitious and evil). There’s a lot of action and combat, but not much sense of physicality. Magic is plentiful and the setting unique, except that it’s still just “magic as technology in not-America” (with so many damn crystals). It’s not a bad book, and it’s not like this is a genre with a lot of options, but I feel like this could be tighter and more imaginative.