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I'm catching up on my reading over the holiday, can you tell?

To be perfectly honest, I had planned on skipping this one. When the cover originally went up on Baen's site, my first thought was "bleh". When I read the blurb (which frankly bares only a passing resemblance to the actual plot), I was even less enthused. I was honestly picturing a low rent Laurell K. Hamilton knockoff.

But this was Baen books, and while not everything the publish is to my tastes, most of the stuff they publish is worth the price of admission. What's more, I remember Toni Weisskopf's enthusiasm when she mentioned this book at DragonCon, so it went on my list of maybe's. Yesterday, after I finished Lucy's Blade, I was kicking around, looking for something to read and not really finding anything that caught my interest and I spotted the cover of Draw One In The Dark on Baen's Publishing Schedule, and decided it wouldn't hurt anything to skim the sample chapters. After all, they're free, and if I didn't like the book, I wasn't out anything.

This is a serious case of 'Don't judge a book by its cover', because honestly, the cover ain't that good. What's inside, on the other hand, is pretty darn good. Not perfect, mind you, but well worth the price of the book.

The good.

It's easy to like the characters in this book. Especially Kyrie, who unlike most fantasy heroines doesn't immediately fall swooning into the arms of the biggest jerk in the book. The other characters are also fairly likeable, largely because they're human rather than the impossibly perfect paragons of virtue that seem to fill so much fantasy. What's more, the relationships develop in ways that make sense and the bad guys are actually strong enough to pose a credible threat to the heroes. Better still, the author doesn't feel the need to heap every problem she can think of into the shoulders of her heroes.

The bad.

If the book has one flaw, it's predictability. I'm not sure if the author was going for a mystery structure or not, but I figured out who the bad guys were way before the characters did, and I saw the big twist at the end of the book coming from a mile out. It doesn't actually detract from my enjoyment of the book at all, and it could be that I usually figure out who the murder is way before I'm suppose to, but the book just wasn't very big on surprised.

In short.

I liked this one a lot, despite it being a bit predictable. If you approach it as an adventure story with good characterization, it's a good way to spend a few hours. It doesn't fall into the trap of every character being some kind of supernatural entity, sets up the world without tons of infodumping, and does a good job of setting up a series of novels without the 'see you for the sequel, sucker' ending you sometimes get with novels in a series.