Mini Book Review: The Folding Knife

It's a K.J. Parker book, so you'll know there will be incredibly elaborate schemes, crushing disappointments, and looming dread. In the mood for the Engineer trilogy plus quasi-Venetian mercantile intrigue? The parallels with recent financial crises and needless wars in impoverished and mountainous lands are a bit on the nose, but the book is nevertheless oddly compelling. Recommended.

ETA that apparently there is some debate about whether Parker is male or female. Upon first reading the Engineer books, I thought them some of the most stereotypically masculine stuff I'd read in a long time. But on further contemplation and after reading additional works, the carefully detailed sadism with which the male leads are set up and then hoist by their own petards militates in favor of female authorship.