Sharrukin's Palace

Planning for February 2024

February 2, 2024 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Getting back toward a more normal planning-and-execution style this month, now that Architect of Worlds is just about out the door. Couple of status items before the planning message, though.

Architect of Worlds

Ken Burnside and I are working on a final editorial pass through the book, finding and stepping on the last few textual bugs. Last I heard, Ken thought he would be done with his piece of that sometime next week, after which I suspect it won’t take more than one or two evenings for me to make the necessary tweaks to the text and layout. At which point I generate two PDFs (full-color and greyscale) and send those over to Ken, and my editorial involvement with the project is done.

Ken is working to ensure that hardcopies will be back from the printer before the GAMA Trade Show in early March. He may be able to ship the first batch of hardcopy editions to the folks who are pre-ordering the book before then, otherwise it will probably be mid-March before that happens. E-book copies will likely be available to the general market about the same time. I should be able to distribute e-books to my patrons and play-testers before that, but I don’t have a firm date yet. Patience a little while longer, please.

Human Destiny

With Architect of Worlds finished, I think my first new creative project is going to involve turning back to the Human Destiny setting.

My long-term plans for that setting have changed a bit. I have a couple of stories from that universe already published (“Pilgrimage” and “In the House of War”), but those have never sold very well for lack of advertising and word-of-mouth.

I think I may actually pull those stories back, do some setting redesign to match my more current thinking, and then start releasing fiction through a different avenue: the Royal Road website.

Royal Road tends to focus on so-called “progression” fiction – long-running serialized stories in which the protagonist gains in personal power and influence in the course of the narrative. It occurs to me that the story of my central character – Aminata Ndoye, the first human to become an officer in an alien interstellar service – would work pretty well as a (subtle) progression story. After all, she works her way upward in social status and rank throughout her career.

The nice thing about Royal Road is that it enables you to start building up an audience for your work, eventually working toward a paid-publication roll-out that’s likely to be more successful. We’ll see.

So the plan there is to rework the “setting bible” a bit, firm up the plan for a long-term narrative for Aminata’s story, rewrite the existing pieces to fit the new narrative, and start writing new fiction as well. Once I have a good chunk of Aminata’s early story down, I can start releasing that to Royal Road and attracting an audience for it. Patrons will, of course, get to see that new material as I get it laid out.

The new version of Human Destiny is also likely to tie into a tabletop RPG project, most likely using Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying (BRP) system. In particular, the setting bible is likely to be framed as a BRP book that might get self-published in the long run.

Other Projects

There are also a couple of other settings I’m thinking about spending some time with, notably the Great Lands setting (high fantasy, related to my first published novel, The Curse of Steel) and the Fourth Millennium setting (historical fantasy, related to my unfinished novel, Twice-Crowned). These are likely to be back-burner items through February while I work on finishing Architect of Worlds and getting some material laid down for Human Destiny.

So here’s the formal plan for February:

Front Burner:
- Architect of Worlds: Finish editorial work on the release draft and turn that over to Ken Burnside for publication in the February-March timeframe.
- Human Destiny: Outline and begin rewriting the setting bible, possibly in the form of a draft BRP sourcebook.
- Human Destiny: Write a new Aminata Ndoye story, set when she’s about seventeen years old and attending an academy for officer candidates for the interstellar service.
Back Burner:
- Great Lands: Begin work to revise the geography and back history of the setting.
- Fourth Millennium: Resume work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
- Fourth Millennium: Resume work to rebuild the alternate-historical timeline.

I would estimate a 75% chance of a charged release for my patrons this month, most likely some combination of Human Destiny setting-bible material and a new Aminata Ndoye story. As usual, that’s more likely as I produce more than about 10,000 words of substantively new material, and becomes a near certainty as I approach 20,000 words. We’ll see how the month goes.

Status Report (30 January 2024)

January 31, 2024 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Just a quick note to let patrons and readers know how things are going.

Things are moving very quickly with respect to getting Architect of Worlds out the door. We have a book cover (see above), and Ken Burnside and I are doing our final editorial-and-layout-adjustments pass. I expect I’ll be handing a final-release draft off to Ken in no more than a few days, after which the book may be on the market in e-book format very quickly. I should have patron rewards ready to distribute almost immediately after that. Hardcopy will take longer, but that may be available for pre-order on the Ad Astra Games site fairly soon too.

I don’t have a tranche of new original fiction to release to patrons before the end of January, so this will probably be the last month in which there’s no charged release on Patreon. I may have a free reward to push out by tomorrow – a bit of fan-fiction I wrote a while back, which I obviously won’t be charging for. It will still serve as something to remind my patrons that I do actually write fiction from time to time!

Decent chance I’ll actually have a book review out shortly as well. I tripped over a book that’s surprisingly enjoyable, even though it breaks about every rule I have for “this is worth reading.” As I mentioned earlier, I’ll be serving as a judge for the Indie Ink awards for the next few months, but this one might get a quick review before I have to settle in and get working on that.

Otherwise, day job and university courses are keeping me at a dead run, but I’m somehow managing to keep ahead of it all. More news as we move into February.

An Announcement Regarding Reviews

January 26, 2024 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

For the first few months of 2024, I’m going to be serving as a judge for the 2024 Indie Ink Awards. That means I’ll be reading and reviewing a bunch of books, but I won’t be publishing those reviews here until the 2024 awards are finished sometime in August.

If you still want your book to be considered for a review here (and on Amazon and Goodreads) under my usual procedures, feel free to drop me a line as you normally would. Just be aware that I’m a bit less likely to have time for additional reviews for at least the next couple of months.

Meanwhile, I may or may not continue to publish at least one review per month while the contest is under way. It all depends on my schedule for the contest and other work. Regular monthly reviews will resume once the judging period is over – I’ll make a post here when that happens.

Planning for January 2024

January 6, 2024 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Once more, my creative situation hasn’t altered much since last month . . . but that is about to change dramatically.

At the moment, I am only a few days away from being ready to hand Architect of Worlds off to my publisher at Ad Astra Games. Last night I reached the end of the draft in this final editorial-art direction-layout pass. That doesn’t mean I’m finished just yet, but I can now do things like resolve the last “p. XX” references, build a Table of Contents, and so on. I’m guessing I may be ready to send the production PDF files over to Ken Burnside by the end of next week.

Now, the rest of my life is uncommonly busy at the moment.

My day job is as an instructional designer and instructor; I do research, write course materials, and occasionally teach. At the moment we’re about to begin a pilot offering for the biggest single course I’ve ever designed . . . and we plan to pilot two more courses after that, stretching through most of 2024, courses I haven’t even started on yet. Let’s just say I’m likely to be putting in a lot of hours on evenings and weekends over most of the coming year.

Meanwhile, I’m also working toward a second bachelor’s degree, and eventually my first graduate degree, with a plan to complete the course of study about the time I’m ready to retire from my day job. So far my coursework has been almost entirely review, but it does take up some time. For example, this weekend I’m working through some material I hadn’t had time to stay caught up on throughout the month of December.

So that’s the background noise that’s going to stay consistent, even while I put (the first edition of) Architect of Worlds on its final glide-path to release. Still, once those PDFs are out the door, a big slot will open up on my calendar for new forms of creative work. How completely I’ll be able to pivot in the month of January remains to be seen, but by the end of the month I hope to at least get started on some new creative work.

What’s that going to involve? At the moment, I think I’m going to get back to working on my more-or-less-hard-SF universe, under the working title of The Human Destiny. Which will involve some combination of:

Doing a zero-based review of the existing setting material, some of which I’ve decided to rethink from scratch. For example, elements of the history of the galaxy and the structure of interstellar civilizations, some of the specific aliens I designed back in the day, and so on.
Revisiting, revising, and possibly repackaging some of the fiction I’ve already written in that universe, in part to fit the revised setting assumptions.
Writing some new fiction, most likely centered around my character Aminata Ndoye, the first human to become an officer aboard an alien starship. I’m planning to start releasing some of that online as serialized fiction, through vehicles like the Royal Road website. Hopefully that will help build a bigger audience that I’ve had so far.
Starting to collect material for a tabletop RPG treatment of the setting, most likely structured around a licensed game system such as Monte Cook’s Cypher or (more likely at present) Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying.

I’m not going to try to build a formal task list, as I’ve done in previous “planning for the coming month” posts. Things are too much in a state of flux at the moment. It’s safe to say that January 2024 will involve two major themes: (1) finishing Architect of Worlds at last and putting it in the hands of my publisher; and (2) pivoting to resume work on the Human Destiny setting. Exactly where I stand on 31 January will inform the more structured planning messages for February 2024 and onward.

For my patrons: There may be a charged release at the end of this month, for the first time in quite a while. It depends on whether I can produce enough new or substantially revised Human Destiny material to justify that. You can probably count on charged releases resuming on a more-or-less regular monthly basis by February 2024.

2023 in Review

January 1, 2024 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

2023 was . . . kind of a rough year for me and my family. Things seemed to be moving along smoothly until mid-June, at which point a series of minor disasters struck.

Past as Prologue

First, my basement apartment and workspace flooded. We had to pack everything up and move it into storage, repair some of the plumbing, tear up and repair the house’s foundation, install a new drainage system and sump pump, put in new carpet and drywall, and finally move everything back in. Along the way we replaced the water heater. Then the house’s HVAC system went on the fritz, and we ended up replacing the furnace and air conditioning equipment. Then we discovered that we had an infestation of mice, which led to us having the insulation in the attic torn out and replaced – which also caused yet another outbreak of flooding, when the work crew broke open the sprinkler lines up there. Still more drywall repair and painting, although at least we saved the carpets that time, and the exterminators picked up the costs.

By my count, I spent somewhere between 40% and 50% of my annual salary on home repairs this year. Fortunately we had the financial reserves to call upon, but that still hurt. We’re probably not going to get back to our earlier savings state until sometime next year. Assuming I’m still employed by 2025.

Meanwhile, about the time we were wrestling with all of that, I decided to start on a second university degree. As of right now, I’m aiming for a new BSc in Natural Sciences from the Open University in the UK, with a plan to earn a graduate degree in astronomy or space science by the time I retire. All of which entails a fairly healthy commitment of time. Back in August and September that didn’t seem unreasonable . . .

. . . but then, in the September-October timeframe, the biggest course-development project of my entire public-service career came down firmly upon my shoulders, a commitment that’s suddenly pushing everything else aside and probably will throughout 2024.

Well. My time-management and stress-management skills, such as they are, are being sorely tested at the moment. There hasn’t been much relief throughout the second half of 2023, and I don’t anticipate getting to relax much until very late in the new year.

Still, I’ve survived the slings and arrows so far. I’ve even managed to get some good creative work done. I had hoped to have Architect of Worlds completely finished by now, but I can’t complain about that project’s status. As of this moment, the book is finished in final draft, and I’m putting the finishing touches on art selection and layout. I fully expect to have a complete production draft ready within a week or so. Which is a good thing, because Architect now has a publisher. It’s close to a certainty that the book will be on sale through Ad Astra Games and DriveThruRPG no later than March 2024.

I also got another dozen or so book reviews done, and I seem to be attracting a small reputation as a reviewer. I’m apparently going to be serving as a judge for an indie-press writer’s award in the coming year, which should be interesting.

Meanwhile, traffic to this blog remains steady, and I have about twice as many patrons as I did this time last year. Thanks to all of you for your support!

New Ventures

Once Architect is out the door, that means I’ll be free for the first time in over a year to think about other creative projects. I think 2024 is going to be the year I pivot back to writing fiction, with an eye to self-publishing as much of it as possible.

Previous ventures in that direction haven’t been terribly successful – I’ve got a novel and a couple of smaller pieces out there, but they’ve sold very poorly. After quite a bit of thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that my approach was just flat-out incorrect.

To be a successful indie author, you need to take on a lot of roles – editor, art director, communications director, marketing guru. If you don’t have the time, energy, or skill for any of those tasks, you have to hire someone else to do them for you. I’ve been very reluctant to do that in the past, because it sometimes seems as if the entire self-publishing industry is one enormous vanity press. If anyone out there was making money on the basis of my self-published work, it certainly wasn’t me. My editor made money, Amazon and Meta made money, Adobe and Tafi made money, I made not a dime. The only money coming my way was from Patreon.

Okay, time to embrace the reality. I’m going to get back to writing fiction, but I’m going to apply some new techniques for building an audience. I’m also going to bite the bullet and set up a reasonable budget for editing, art, and promotion for each new novel or collection I decide to self-publish. Still going to avoid the worst vanity presses out there, but that doesn’t mean I can’t benefit from professional help. Which may mean that I never get much past “writing as an expensive hobby,” but at least I’ll be able to get my work in front of more people. Who knows, the lightning may strike.

Most likely candidates for new fiction include work set in a re-imagined Human Destiny setting, and the novel Twice-Crowned and its adjacent Fourth Millennium setting. Both of which may also give rise to my next tabletop gaming projects as well. Human Destiny is a decent candidate for that – Ken Burnside, the fellow who will be publishing Architect of Worlds, has already expressed some interest.

The Year’s Blog Traffic

The top ten posts for 2023 turned out to be:

The high-traffic posts seemed to be a mix of Architect of Worlds material, general world-building notes, discussion of possible future tabletop-game projects, and status reports about the year’s setbacks. Not unexpected.

So those are my objectives for the coming year: get Architect of Worlds out the door at last, pivot back to writing fiction on a regular basis, and experiment with new ways to get my work in front of interested eyeballs. All while keeping my day job happy, studying for my university courses, and hopefully finding a little time to unwind here and there.

Not expecting any boredom, that’s for sure. With any luck my health, the state of my finances, and the political climate in the country I have to live in will all stay favorable.

Review: The Wolf Queen, by Marie McCurdy

December 29, 2023 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

The Wolf Queen by Marie McCurdy

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

The Wolf Queen is an historical novel, set in the time of the early Roman Empire, but focusing on the peoples of Germania across the Rhine. It’s a bloody and violent story about a major incident in the relationship between Rome and its “barbarian” neighbors. It’s also a very sexy and involving love story.

Thusnelda is the daughter of a chieftain of the Cherusci tribe of the Germani. As a girl, she was once betrothed to a young Cherusci warrior named Ermin, but he was captured by the Romans and taken, as far as Thusnelda knows, into slavery. Thusnelda grows up a warrior-woman in her own right, working behind the scenes to prop up her rather ineffectual father and brothers in their position as the leading family of the Cherusci. In fact, she rather despises her family, who are loyal clients of the Roman Empire, and secretly she burns for German freedom.

Early in the story, we see Thusnelda and another German girl assaulted by a Roman patrol. They defend themselves fiercely, killing several Roman soldiers, before being overcome. Thusnelda is brought before the Roman governor of Germania, Publius Quinctilius Varus. The governor reprimands the soldiers and lets Thusnelda go . . . but not before she sees her once-betrothed for the first time in years. Ermin is now calling himself “Arminius” in the Roman style, and he is not only a Roman citizen but also a commander of auxiliary troops under Varus.

Much of the novel is devoted to the efforts of Thusnelda and Arminius to foment a revolt against Roman authority. Thusnelda doesn’t trust Arminius at first, and the two of them often work at cross-purposes. Meanwhile, Thusnelda’s rebellious activities alienate her from the rest of her Roman-loyalist family. Her new fiancé, a chieftain of the Chatti tribe named Reimar, suspects she is becoming romantically involved with Arminius and becomes increasingly hostile. Thusnelda spends most of the story torn among conflicting loyalties, especially after she realizes she does still have feelings for Arminius.

The astute reader will know from the beginning how the historical story will turn out: the German revolt of 9 AD and the famous Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. Ms. McCurdy’s retelling of these events is very well-researched and plausible, reflecting what little is known about German society and political culture at that time. She does a great job of taking the available sources – all of them Roman and not necessarily credible – and treating them with critical attention. In particular, her reinterpretation of the documented relationship between Thusnelda and Arminius was very credible.

If anything, I was surprised when this novel drew to a close, because I knew Thusnelda’s story was far from over. I understand Ms. McCurdy plans a sequel, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing what she does with that.

The narrative flow here is very smooth. The story is told entirely from Thusnelda’s first-person viewpoint, and we get a good look at her opinions and reactions to everything that happens. Exposition is very gracefully handled; Ms. McCurdy rarely succumbs to the temptation for an “information dump,” instead painting a picture of the time and place entirely through Thusnelda’s eyes. Very nicely done for a debut novel.

Readers should be aware that the story is full of graphic language, explicit scenes of violence, and a few very explicit sex scenes. I caught a few copy- and line-editing stumbles, but they were rare and never had the effect of pulling me out of the story.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Wolf Queen, and I’m certainly looking forward to anything else Ms. McCurdy might create. Very highly recommended.

Review: Bookshops & Bonedust, by Travis Baldree

December 23, 2023 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

I wouldn’t normally be reviewing Travis Baldree’s second novel, because after the success of his debut story (Legends & Lattes) he no longer falls under the category of “self-published or indie author.” On the other hand, I did review the earlier book, and I really enjoyed this one, so . . .

Bookshops & Bonedust is light fantasy, set in a fantasy universe that’s clearly inspired by tabletop role-playing games, with a dash of Terry Pratchett in the mix. It’s a prequel to Legends & Lattes, focusing on the same protagonist: Viv the orc warrior. Here, though, Viv is at the very beginning of her career as an adventurer.

At the beginning of the story, Viv is a very junior member of an adventuring group called Rackam’s Ravens, who have been hired to deal with a necromancer. During a fierce battle against undead, her recklessness gets her seriously injured. Rackam orders her to separate from the group and take refuge in a nearby coastal town called Murk, where she can recover from her wounds.

Viv reaches Murk, and finds it to be a very quiet place. While she’s there, her injuries are slow to heal, which leaves her struggling to do things she would once have taken for granted. The combination is terrible for a reckless young orc, who very quickly finds herself bored out of her mind.

Almost out of desperation, Viv becomes involved with some of the townspeople of Murk, especially a bookseller named Fern. Fern recently inherited a bookshop from her father, and has been struggling to keep the business afloat in a backwater town like Murk. Yet Fern has a gift for finding just the right book for anyone . . . even an orc warrior who has never experienced the joy of reading.

Viv reads the first book, and comes back for more. Then she begins lending a hand as Fern fights to revive her business. She makes friends among the townsfolk. She even falls into a mystery that may have something to do with the necromancer she had been fighting in the first place. In the process, we get to watch her attain a little hard-won maturity, putting her on the path to become the world-wise veteran we met in Legends & Lattes.

Travis Baldree continues to show a very clean prose style, and the editing here is what I would expect from a traditional publishing house. I caught no significant copy or line-editing stumbles. The story structure remains very direct, told entirely in Viv’s close-third-person perspective.

The plot is a little less focused and unified than the earlier novel. There’s more of a sense of several plot threads moving at once, and some of them are more high-stakes than we’ve seen in this world before. That wider focus didn’t bother me, but it left the story feeling not quite as cozy as Legends & Lattes.

I thoroughly enjoyed Bookshops & Bonedust, and I really do hope to see more from Travis Baldree in this world. Very highly recommended if you enjoy light low-stakes fantasy.

“Architect of Worlds” Has a Publisher

December 16, 2023 Sharrukin Comments 1 comment

I’ve been putting off this announcement for a while, but as of a couple of days ago I have a signed contract, so this is a done deal and I can finally talk about it.

Architect of Worlds has a publisher: Ad Astra Games, a small press that’s primarily known for games like Squadron Strike and Attack Vector: Tactical, highly realistic yet playable simulations of space warfare. Ad Astra also publishes a few non-fiction pieces that are great resources for anyone trying to develop fictional futures.

Ad Astra is a one-man show, with Ken Burnside as the proprietor. Ken is a long-standing acquaintance who has been watching the development of Architect of Worlds for quite some time. He seems to think that Architect would be a good fit for the rest of his product line and his usual audience, and I tend to agree. It helps that Ken has advertising, promotion, and distribution contacts that I simply can’t match – I suspect Architect will see at least a full order of magnitude better sales as a result of this deal.

The terms Ken offered me are pretty generous, so I’m quite pleased with this development, and I’m looking forward to seeing the results.

In the meantime, as promised, my patrons at the Intermediate Support level and above – along with a few “patrons emeritus” who have contributed to the “playtesting” of Architect over the years – can expect to receive their copies of the released e-book once it’s ready. Look for that sometime in the February-March timeframe. My deadline to get finished drafts over to Ken is 1 February, but to be honest I can’t see that taking any longer than very early January at the rate I’m moving. We should be able to have both e-book and printed copies ready for the spring convention season.

Planning for December 2023

December 4, 2023 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Not much change from last month.

My final editing-and-layout-and-filler-art pass on Architect of Worlds is about half finished. As of this evening, I’ve made it through page 89 out of 188, so just short of halfway through the book. That brings me to the beginning of the “Designing World Surface Conditions” section. As I remarked a few days ago, I may be making some small adjustments to the rules in this section, but for the moment I don’t see that slowing down my progress all that much. Time commitments for my studies and my day job notwithstanding, I still think I can have the whole book ready by the end of calendar year 2023, or at least not too far into January 2024.

Matters with the potential publisher for Architect of Worlds are still hanging fire. We’ve reached an informal agreement, but until I’ve signed a contract I can’t say the deal is complete, and so I still can’t comment further on that. Hopefully we can get that out of the way shortly.

We’re still looking at a formal release date for the book sometime in March 2024.

The current list of outstanding tasks, unmodified from last month:

Editorial Work:

Make final alterations to the design sequence or other rules for this edition, based on recent patron and reader feedback.
Perform a final editorial pass through the complete text, correcting typos, style inconsistencies, errors in tables or mathematical formulae, and “page XX” references.
Generate and lay out the copyright & acknowledgements page.
Generate and lay out the Table of Contents.

Art Direction:

Create separate “print on demand” (almost entirely greyscale) and “e-book” (full color) layers in the InDesign layout, supporting the production of two release PDFs.
Correct all cases where space for filler art was allocated by changing the size of the page’s main text frame, as opposed to placing an explicit object frame.
Create greyscale versions of (some) existing full-color images and place those in the layout on the appropriate layer.
Generate additional filler art throughout the book, placing both full-color and greyscale versions on the appropriate layers.
Create (or receive from publisher) new front and back cover images, and integrate these into the release PDFs.

I didn’t have much time to write fiction in November, and given how much of my time is spoken for, that’s probably not going to change in December. What little free time I have, I need to work on book reviews – I’ve only just finished one for October (a month late), and I need to be thinking about November and December so as to get caught up. Otherwise, right now my plan is to get Architect out the door, and only then think about what I want to do with other game-development projects and fiction. Stay tuned.

Review: House Aretoli, by K. M. Butler

November 30, 2023 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

House Aretoli by K. M. Butler

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

House Aretoli is an historical novel which paints a vivid picture of the early Italian Renaissance. Our scene is the Venetian Republic, a city where merchant families rather than warrior-aristocrats rule, yet the schemes for power and influence are no less deadly.

In the summer of 1363, Niccolo Aretoli is a young man serving on the military staff of Leonardo Dandolo, the Venetian governor of Crete. When a sudden rebellion takes place among the native population, Niccolo soon earns a reputation as a military hero. He saves the governor’s life, and assists in the evolution of Venetian citizens from the island.

Alas, when the Venetian exiles return home, Niccolo soon finds his new reputation small consolation. His beloved fiancé has married in his absence – to his own brother, no less – and the family soon suffers a terrible loss at the hands of a rival house’s schemes. Niccolo is forced to plot and struggle for his rights, opposing even members of his own family. In the process, he uncovers a plot against the Venetian state itself.

In Mr. Butler’s previous historical novels, he’s shown a gift for writing stories that fit into the interstices of what little is known today about a given period. House Aretoli is a particularly good example. The titular family and its struggles are fictional, but utterly plausible for the late medieval world. Documented events from the period are woven into the narrative. On the other hand, the resolution of the story is tied up in one of the era’s minor mysteries; the events of the climax aren’t documented, but are surprisingly credible given what little we do know.

Once again, Mr. Butler brings history to vivid life, including the differences between the cultural values of the past era and our own. Character motivations make sense, even when they feel very alien to a modern audience.

The flow of the narrative here is smooth and easy to follow. The story occasionally leaves Niccolo’s viewpoint, but sections told from other perspectives are cleanly labeled and never confusing. Necessary exposition is delivered through character dialogue or internal reflection, and it’s never a distraction. The story’s political intrigues are easy to grasp, even when they become a little convoluted.

The only serious complaint I had about House Aretoli was in the mechanics of prose style. Mr. Butler’s past novels have been quite clean, but this one had enough copy- and line-editing stumbles that I found myself distracted more than once. This was never quite enough to overcome my commitment to Niccolo’s tale, but a less engaging story might have lost me.

As with Mr. Butler’s previous efforts, I thoroughly enjoyed House Aretoli, and I’m certainly looking forward to his further work. Very highly recommended.