I was looking for great Grimdark fantasy, and boy does The Blacktongue Thief deliver. As a single-person POV, the novel revolves around Kinch's personality and narrative style. He's clever in the worldly sense, but also with the way he phrases words and explains concepts. Combined with an imaginative medieval fantasy world that has seen humanity brought to its knees by goblins and giants, this novel has put Christopher Buehlman high on my list of authors to follow.

The worldbuilding in this is fantastic - with a lot of time spent fleshing out both internal and external concepts. The Thief's guild that Kinch belongs to is elaborately sketched out, and how he (and it) interacts with the world lets you see the internal workings of the human lands as well as the general technology of the times, but also the exceptional things like magic and lost artifacts. Galva receives an equal amount of backstory, which is good because it would have been so easy for most authors to write a badass swordswoman and call it a day. But in addition to tying her historically to the goblins, the creative handmaiden of death religion comes up often and reminds me how truly different this world is.

And then there's the goblins and giants. The antagonists are different... alien even. They are described in detail such that you really fear them for how different they are from humanity, and then we get a dose of realism in terms of politics and how human nations would deal with having borders with such creatures. It's brutal and grim.

In case it's not obvious, I'm in love with this book. The worst part is that there's no follow up as of the writing of this review.

Highly recommended.