Tsalmoth

Vlad Taltos, Book 16

By: Steven Brust

Narrated by: Kevin Stillwell

Tsalmoth is the next installment in Steven Brust’s bestselling Vlad Taltos series—hold on to your hats and get ready for another swashbuckling adventure!

First comes love. Then comes marriage....

Vlad Taltos is in love. With a former assassin who may just be better than he is at the Game. Women like this don’t come along every day and no way is he passing up a sure bet.

So a wedding is being planned. Along with a shady deal gone wrong and a dead man who owes Vlad money. Setting up the first and trying to deal with the second is bad enough. And then bigger powers decide that Vlad is the perfect patsy to shake the power structure of the kingdom.

More's the pity that his soul is sent walkabout to do it.

How might Vlad get his soul back and have any shot at a happy ending? Well, there’s the tale....

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

©2023 Steven Brust (P)2024 Audible, Inc.

Happy go lucky hitman

This made me want to go back and re-read the whole series. The Vlad Taltos novels are criminally underappreciated. Brust's knack for description, dialog, and highlighting the internal absurdity of a situation is full on display here. Seeing a younger, more brash Vlad was nice and reminded me of the sharp humor and down to earth fantasy realm that I first fell in love with.

I so want to see him finish this series.

Still worth the listen

After the first half of the book being extremely rough getting used to a new narrator you settle in to the same charm and snark of the rest of the series. I think the new narrator is solid, however characters like kragar and loiosh really lose their charm with his performance. Overall still great to peek back into a time when vlad and cawti were first getting together.

A series you can register to over and over

One of the most richly layered series you will ever read. on it surface it's filled with daring and daggers, mystery and magic, and clever repartè. And if that's all you want, this will satisfy you thoroughly! But beneath that lies mysteries about fate and power, gods and monsters, and what makes a being "human". And beneath that, is a person wrestling with the problematic structures of his society, of exploitation vs freedom, and of how to function in a societal structure that has been intentionally built to be wrong.

Spectacularly Awful Narrator

I can handle a new Narrator. I can handle a bad narrator. Kevin Stillwell is by far the worst narrator I have ever experienced. Every word drips with pretentious disdain for the listener. I could not finish listening and I LOVE this series.

Great story, but so sad to not have the old narrator

Kevin is amazing and honestly does a decent job (except for kragar lol), but I miss Bernard. overall amazing entry!

I'm a fan.of the series but this deep in is a terrible time to change narrators.

I was willing to accept that an a new narrator would give different inflections and caidience to characters voices but what he did with Kregar is unforgivable. It Genuinely ruined the book foe me.

Changing narrators is so jarring

It is so difficult to get through this- the voices are all wrong and different from the previous 10+ books. It is very hard to accept. It took me forever to get through this book because I did not like the new voice and tone of characters I had come to know so well.

Another banger.

Filling in more of Vlad's backstory an excellent tale. I do have to wonder how much weight the audiobook narrator gains when doing one of these though.

Use me as a bring back Bernard button.

Honestly this would have been my favorite backwards facing book if we had Bernard. I already paid for Lyorn but I’m telling you now what I won’t do the final book this way if we can’t find a way to kickstarter or go fund me a way to get Bernard back.

I'd pay again for a version with the old narrator

Great story muddied by a distracting narration. When the narrator mispronounces the main characters name, and the author makes a specific note about people mispronouncing it, it's just embarrassing. Not to mention Kragar, I couldn't tell you what's going on with that voice.