Three Parts Dead (Max Gladstone)

Three Parts Dead
The Craft Sequence, Book 1
Max Gladstone
Tor
Fiction, Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: For generations, Applied Theology allowed human priests to channel the power of the gods, immortal beings who fed in turn on the faith and soulstuff of their believers... until a century ago, when one man posited that the theory behind theology could be used in other ways. Thus rose the Craft, schools of men and women who sought to harness power for themselves, culminating in the God Wars of fifty years ago that saw most deities destroyed. Kos the Everburning, fire god of the vast city of Alt Coulumb, was one of the survivors - until a few days ago.
Tara Abernathy's graduation from the Hidden Schools of the Craft was marred by her immediate ejection from the floating edifice and a plummet to Earth she barely survived. Her exile ends unexpectedly when a former professor, Elayne Kevarian, recruits her to a private necromancy firm. Their first job: resurrect Kos, or at least a semblance of Him, so the lights stay on in Alt Coulumb and the citizens don't panic when the last of His residual power fades with the turning of the moon. But before they can resurrect the god, they have to figure out why He died... leading Tara and shaken acolyte Abelard on a twisted, dangerous trail in search of Kos's murderer.

REVIEW: Three Parts Dead starts with a great premise - a murdered god - in a complex and intriguing world, where deities are as much a manifestation of magical contracts (power paid out for faith paid in, with interest) as independent entities. Elements of necromancy, religion, borderline steampunk, and more blend into the strange web of people and powers that make up Alt Coulumb. At first, it's an exhilirating mixture, complete with characters who may have moral compass deficiencies but are definitely interesting. At times, though, the surreality overwhelms the interest; though some elements of the magic systems feel solid, others are murky enough that literally anything seems either possible or impossible, which can be dazzling or numbing (in this case, tending toward the latter.) It moves quickly, if sometimes circularly and/or bizarrely, down winding city streets and the boiler room bowels of the great church of Kos, up to rooftops where a secretive race of stone Guardians mourns their lost creator, through an elite club where vampires and other inhumans (or marginally humans) party and indulge sadomasochistic fantasies, and even into a courtroom where advocates battle their cases out via magic, though a few elements of the climax were telegraphed blatantly while others felt dropped in from nowhere. By the end, I felt subtly let down for reasons I couldn't quite identify; at some point, I think I stopped enjoying the characters and was left wandering through a world just a hair too surreal to be believed. Still, the overall ideas were nicely unique and certainly intriguing, even if I don't expect to follow the series further.

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