The Perfect Assassin (2019)
Series: Chronicles of Ghadid, Book 1
Written by: K.A. Doore
Genre: Fantasy
Pages: 350 (Trade Paperback)
Publisher: Tor
Why I Chose It: I have a love-hate relationship with assassin stories, because on one hand, murder is bad! Assassins are not admirable people, right? On the other hand, fictional assassins are often fun to read, super-skilled, and get into the most interesting fixes. This one came to my attention and the blurb ticked off a lot of things that made me interested: the reluctant trainee assassin, the murderous jaan (what are jaan??? I have to know!), and the assassin-turned-detective. The lovely cover by Larry Rostant didn’t hurt.
The premise:
A novice assassin is on the hunt for someone killing their own in K.A. Doore’s The Perfect Assassin, a breakout high fantasy beginning the Chronicles of Ghadid series.
Divine justice is written in blood.
Or so Amastan has been taught. As a new assassin in the Basbowen family, he’s already having second thoughts about taking a life. A scarcity of contracts ends up being just what he needs.
Until, unexpectedly, Amastan finds the body of a very important drum chief. Until, impossibly, Basbowen’s finest start showing up dead, with their murderous jaan running wild in the dusty streets of Ghadid. Until, inevitably, Amastan is ordered to solve these murders, before the family gets blamed.
Every life has its price, but when the tables are turned, Amastan must find this perfect assassin or be their next target.
Spoilers marked below.
Discussion: One of the things that first impressed me was the setting. I recently slogged through a book where the setting was infuriatingly limited, so I was glad to see that Doore really made Ghadid live and breathe. Doore showed us a city where access to water came and went, where water was currency as well as life. A city where wasting water can be a literal death sentence. But it’s more than the seasonal abundance/scarcity of water that sells this setting as entirely believable. Doore gives us clothing and food, language and honorifics, and constant reminders of the physical environment, down to some glass greenhouses being cast with sand, to provide footing for those who worked there — good and specific details that mattered. For an example, healing magic is a function of water carrying the spellwork into the body. At the end of the season, there’s very little water available, which makes all the fights and scrapes and injuries that much more threatening.
I enjoyed the complexity of the antagonists. Amastan faces several antagonists here — political ones who want to change the way Ghadid is run, presumably for the worse; a killer who is bent on killing assassins in a rather not-so-clever plan; and the jaani. The jaani were my favorite because well, who doesn’t love creepy spirit monsters that want to wear your body like a suit? Jaani, in this telling, are the souls of people who died and whose bodies were left unattended until the jaani broke free and went wild. If they’re not settled, they will possess or kill people, or try to collect their own people-parts to make themselves a new body. They’re terrible for the residents, but wonderful for the reader. I loved that the first defense against someone you thought might be possessed by a jaan was the simple question, “Are you sane?” The jaan will always say no.
Amastan will fight all of these enemies in different ways, and I enjoyed that he wasn’t a one-trick, kill-’em-all pony.
I liked the set-up of the assassin “family.” The “cousins” are a functional society of assassins without a lot of fancy cachet. In Ghadid, being an assassin is a job with clear reasons for existing. In such a geographically isolated society where your family name is important, sometimes the best way to be rid of a criminal is to have them quietly killed, sparing the family name and general chaos. If you’re killed by one of the cousins, the consensus is you deserved it.
I liked Amastan’s personal adjustment from being worried about being an assassin to accepting that it’s an important job. I liked his recognition of how easily this position could be misused. I liked that he had to stand against some powerful people, and that his own sense of right and wrong was strong enough to guide him.
I liked the younger generation having to clean up the older generation’s mess. They start out thinking that the elders are the ones who are leading their lives right: Tamella, the head of the assassin guild who trains them; the drum chiefs who run the city; the marabi who wrangle jaan. Over the course of the book, Amastan realizes that the older generation has gotten sloppy in their ethics. Jaan are a source of danger that the entire community is supposed to fight, but when the jaani starting running amok, the elders’ response is more exasperated than concerned. It’s left to Menna, another young assassin/junior marab, to come up with a newer spell to control the wild jaani. Amastan comes to the conclusion that his mentor, Tamella, has lost her perspective on assassination. The job has become personal to her. The whole mess is very much a “sins of the elder generation” visiting itself on the younger.
I enjoyed Amastan’s relationship with Menna, who is the brash counterpart of Amastan’s more cautious ways. She’s on his side, but she’s far from a pushover.
I liked that this book was LGBT-friendly. Our protagonist is attracted to a young man; there is a married female couple. It’s all just part of the world, not notable to the characters. I always like societies that are built around that type of casual acceptance.
So was it all wine and roses and a lovefest for this book? No, sadly, there were some parts that I didn’t enjoy.
SPOILERS begin here.
I thought the first third of the book was uneven. There were spikes of interest as they found bodies, or as Amastan and Menna fended off jaani. There were also scenes that dragged for me. I loved the premise: Amastan is tasked with finding and stopping the person who’s killing other assassins and creating jaani. But Amastan flails for a long time as an investigator because he doesn’t really know what he’s doing, much less how to do it discreetly. That might be realistic for a naive historian-turned-assassin-turned-detective, but it meant that we spent a good chunk of the first part of the book sharing Amastan’s confusion. I found that tiresome.
I wanted to enjoy his awkward flailing toward a relationship with Yufit, the ex-scribe of one of the murdered drum chiefs, but…it didn’t work for me. Part of the problem is that Yufit has a major role to play in the story, and for Amastan to remain ignorant of that role until the “right” moment requires that Amastan and Yufit don’t ever really talk. So, much of their relationship felt contrived to me, as if Doore was deliberately hobbling them so that the revelation came out when she wanted it to. That said, once the revelation was made, the way it played out was enjoyable.
I also wasn’t sure what role Megar actually played in the narrative. He was a character that struck fear into Amastan for no particular reason that I could tell. I think he was supposed to be a red herring, but he just felt random. This is one of the few places where the worldbuilding bugged me — that Amastan just kept meeting up with Megar and Yufit by accident. How big is Ghadid, again? How populous? The residents of Ghadid all wear tagel — scarves that they wear higher or lower depending on how well they know their companions — so how did they all keep recognizing each other at a distance? Up close, sure, I completely believe that a society that’s used to wearing disguising clothing would get very quick at identifying people by eyes and juts of nose or cheekbones. But as a whole, that constant coincidence kept eating at me. It made the pool of citizens feel weirdly small.
There is definitely a point in the narrative where matters pick up and the rest of the pacing goes swiftly and smoothly to an interesting, unpredictable end. On page 167, Amastan stops flailing, comes up with a plan, and then pushes other people to accept his plan. From then on, I was hooked.
In Conclusion: Overall, an interesting first book with excellent worldbuilding and an appealing cast of characters. Based on this read, I’ll pick up the second book, The Impossible Contract, which comes out this November.
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