The Emperor's Edge

Ebook at Smashwords
also at Kobo
amazon.com
amazon.co.uk

The Emperor's Edge is a fantasy novel self-published by Lindsay Buroker. I had a lot of fun reading it thanks to witty dialogue, interesting worldbuilding, and, oh, the plot...

What happens, in one sentence? A former police officer and a hyper-competent assassin (and a few other misfits) try to stop a plot against the young Emperor by counterfeiting money.

It makes more sense in context, and there are more complications. I love stuff like that. I'll mentally shelve it along with "military-school dropout becomes admiral of a space mercenary fleet by accident" (The Warrior's Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold).

The book has a subtitle/tagline of "a high fantasy mystery in an era of steam". The setting is a nice blend of genres, this book taking place in or around the capital of a militaristic and industrial empire where things just happen to be run by steam (occasionally involving punchcards), without the preoccupation with gadgetry that I associate with Steampunk. Magic does crop up, but isn't common - the Empire's official position is that a) it doesn't exist and b) it's banned.

What makes this take on saving the country interesting is the perspective. Amaranthe, who is our viewpoint character most of the time, nearly finished business school before entering what the Empire has for a police force, which informs a lot of her actions, such as recruiting a male escort for her cause on the basis of "someone that good-looking is bound to get good deals from businesswomen. (By the by, I think by making running businesses "women's work", Lindsay Buroker nicely balanced the "What, a woman Enforcer? How cute" chaff Amaranthe catches early on.)

Amaranthe is rather on the idealistic side, and her greatest strength seems to be talking people into things.

Sicarius, the assassin she is sent to kill but teams up with since he seems to be on the Emperor's side, by contrast is practical, amoral, and emotes about as much as a rock for most of the book. (We also don't get into his head.) He's so hyper-competent when it comes to killing people that he gets away with dressing in black accessoried with an armoury of knives in plain view, which I find rather hilarious, but may say more about the setting than anything else, come to think of it.

The second viewpoint character is the young Emperor. There are considerably fewer scenes from this perspective than from Amaranthe's; it seems to work rather well together.

The plot is fast-paced, somewhat twisty, and well interwoven, and thus for me a joy to follow. The book is a bit on the zany side, so I'd say it needs some more willingness to suspend disbelief in favour of rule of cool/rule of funny than some other books out there.

Content warnings? There's violence of various stripes (between an assassin and an evil empire, to be expected) and an attempted rape.

Proof-reading and formatting? I spotted something like three typos (and that the writer prefers "a couple [things]" over "a couple of [things]").
A few chapters had, on my reader and at my chosen font size, an empty page before the start of the next chapter. I'm quite sure that has to do with following the Smashwords Styleguide, which concerns making one master file to be converted into several formats, not all of which honour page breaks.
The book has the neccessary meta-info that lets me jump to chapters through my reader's "table of contents" function, and includes a cover.
That makes this book better proof-read and formatted than at least half the titles I got from big publishing houses.

Bottom line: Under aforementioned caveat, I recommend it highly. I'm definitely looking forward to the sequel.