(This review was written several months ago, before I launched the review site)

I just finished reading Caine Black Knife, by Matthew Stover, book three of the Acts of Caine series.

Quick synopsis: Aging psychopathic murderer Hari “Caine” Michaelson travels to a fantasy frontier town where an oppressed violent orc-like race is watched over by militant soldier-priests of a war god, and tries to help his adopted brother out of a little bit of trouble he’s gotten into with the locals. Things start going wrong in interesting ways almost immediately. Turns out the town is a powder keg set to blow, and Caine is, as always, throwing sparks everywhere just to see what happens.

The book also has a B plot involving a series of flashbacks to the last time Caine was in this town, back before it was actually a town, showing us the history of how he became the famous killer that he is today. Apparently it involved surviving a brutal attack by the infamous Black Knife clan–and subsequently murdering every last one of them.

I liked this book a lot more than Blade of Tyshalle. The fantasy violence is back in full force, and it’s the good stuff, that pure secondhand adrenaline spike to the base of the brain that you get from the best pulp fiction. Also, the book thankfully makes no mention of the Blind God, and as far as I can tell seems to have turned the villainous Studio back into the much more interesting and much more horrifying human form that it took in Heroes Die. Rich kids murdering and torturing for an afternoon’s entertainment is so much more vile than any nebulous god of generic evil could ever hope to be, and Black Knife thankfully reverts to that sort of horror rather than Tyshalle’s abstract god fights and deus ex machinae.

Couple of other things about this book:

This is not for the squeamish. The violence in these books has always been brutal, but this one goes the extra mile with the story of what happened to Caine when he was fighting the Black Knife clan in the wastes, way back when. As the man himself says, it’s maximum bad.

On a more unhappy note, I really need to mention that there’s a lot of homophobic language in this book. I’m not sure if this is a new development, or if this was the case throughout the other books as well and I’m just noticing it now because it reached a critical mass that I couldn’t ignore. Especially from the main character–Caine’s go-to insult seems to be implying that the person he’s talking to likes it up the ass. When I really like the prose in a novel I tend to ignore my usual morals and enjoy the story even if it’s one that I vehemently disagree with or if the main character is genuinely unlikeable, but damn, there’s a line, you know?

That said, the book (and Caine himself) does treat the actual gay characters with just as much respect as everyone else, if not more so. It’s really only the language that’s homophobic. Maybe it’s meant to show off the toxic masculinity of the culture that he’s stepping into, or maybe it’s just because the book was published over ten years ago and the culture was a bit different then, but either way it’s definitely noticeable.

Anyway. Despite its flaws I did really enjoy Caine Black Knife. It brought back the evil of the Studio in a way I liked, it expounded both upon Caine’s past career and the current Overworld political situation, we got to see cool magic knights doing cool things, and we got to see Caine doing what he does best–take a situation and spiral it completely out of control.

Damn thing ended on a cliffhanger, so I’m downloading the fourth and final book in the series to my e-reader now.