Clockwork Boys

Meh.
Not bad over all, but not what i expected.
I wanted to say that i should start reading the blurbs before the books, but that wouldn’t hav helpt here.
The title makes it sound like steampunk, but this is just D&D-stile fantasy. Just yur standard campaign put into novel form. Yu even get a few random monsters thrown in at the end as the party is moving thru the unknown territory.
What really threw me off from locating it were the cigarettes. I know that “anacronism” isn’t really a thing in a fantasy setting. Still, that made me wonder if this wasn’t more of a steampunk stile world after all, which it wasn’t, regardless of what the Clockwork Boys turn out to be in the end.

Oh, that’s why it was so short. It’s not so much the first part of a series but the first half of what is basically a single novel. (I presume. I don’t want to spend the money for two books on one. Especially when the first half wasn’t that great.) I blame Tolkien and people calling Lord of the Rings a Trilogy instead of one much too long novel.
Starting about ½ thru i wondered how they would actually deal with the, yu know, Clockwork Boys when they spent so much time on the road. Turns out, not. That is, maybe, part two. All the Clockwork Boys do here is literally just march by once.

This is a highly entertaining and atypical fantasy in a fairly D&D-ish world. The heroine's a "guerilla accountant" - ie, a forger also specializing in stealth burglery and accountancy set-up jobs. Unfortunately, she's been caught and marked with a carnivorous tattoo (yep, carnivorous tattoos are a thing I didn't know I needed in my fantasy books until now) to ensure she does the job she's tasked with. Which is ... recruiting a band of 3 other criminals and misfits to find out the secrets of the near-unstoppable clockwork golem-type-things that are devastating her side in the current war. (I've only just finished this book and still have the sequel to read so we've only seen one of the clockwork things from afar yet, don't really know what they'll turn out to actually be)

Her partners in infiltration are smart-ass assassin, a depressed ex-demonhunter paladin who is still feeling guilty for having been possessed by a demon and made to murder a whole temple full of innocent people before he was stopped and exorcised, and a 19 year old priest who's afraid to come in contact with women, let alone the one leading the group. Oh yes, and aforementioned fearless guerilla accountant leader has the minor magical ability of being extremely allergic to important things.

And off they go towards enemy territory to try and solve the problem of the clockwork boys, trailing used handkerchiefs that the paladin helpfully buys by the dozen in every town, because if they don't, their tattoos will literally eat them.

The characters are great, the descriptions and ideas unusual, and my only complaint is a cliffhanger ending - but since the sequel is already out, I will just have to start reading it immediately. Right, off to go do that now!