Short version: Redemption Road
Spoilers ahead, but don't worry much about them since I recommend skipping the book.
Let me start with the one favorable point: I didn't need to have read the previous books to follow the setup. The beginning was only briefly confusing as a group of Bulfinche's-based adventurers concluded one adventure and Murphy and Loki (the trickster-god of the Norse mythos) set off on an interstellar road trip before Loki has to report back for his usual punishment of having acid venom dripped on him in payment for his assorted sins against the rest of the Norse pantheon. The extraneous characters, presumably from the previous book, peel off quickly, and enough background is woven in throughout the book that the general shape of things with regard to the pub becomes clear quickly enough for it to be useful as background. Bringing a new reader painlessly up-to-date in mid-series is a non-trivial accomplishment, and Thomas does it well. Unfortunately, there's not a lot else I can be so positive about.
What sold me on the book (aside from the author's charm at a Lunacon dealer's table) was the premise of trickster Loki struggling to redeem himself and the question of whether someone evil could truly change. That sounded quite promising. But Loki was so shallowly portrayed that he never seemed to be all that evil or to struggle much with his decisions. I couldn't bring myself to care at all. The other characters were equally cardboard. And a ludicrous plot didn't help much.
After a detour for Loki to have sex in the form of a dragon, he and Murphy take a trip via "transworld [motor]cycle" to an interstellar/racial crossroads planet with a bar populated by a mix of aliens, trolls, goblins, and stray deities, including an incognito Zeus. (Somewhere in here I started to get faintly irritated by the mythology-mixing: all the Greek deities are known by their Greek names except for Hephaestos, who is called Vulcan, leading one to wonder whether the author simply couldn't spell Hephaestos.) While having gods be all-too-human in their habits and vices is a
workable idea, and not unsuited to the pantheons Thomas plays
with, it begs comparisons with both the mythology itself and with
authors such as Thorne Smith who have successfully pulled it off
After a fight with some of the locals and the acquisition of a few friends, they head off to a planet Murphy calls Karma to save the locals from a bunch of slavers. Karma is a magic-based planet, with its inhabitants growing fatter (though remaining perfectly healthy) when they do good deeds and thinner when they do bad ones. This happens instantly -- magic, remember? -- so you can watch the inhabitants grow and shrink right before your eyes. Being evil can be fatal. Anyone who eats the food on this planet will be subject to the same magic. This presents a problem when trying to fight off slavers, since the planetary magic does not grasp the concept of short-term evil in service of a greater good, nor does it distinguish between deeds a Karman does directly and deeds done on their behalf. So Murphy and Loki's defense of the Karmans has to be strictly non-lethal, lest they kill the people they are trying to save.
This could have been an interesting conundrum, but they figure out a couple of loopholes. First, they hire a mercenary force without telling the Karmans and without telling the mercenaries why they are fighting. Apparently if you don't knowingly do something on someone's behalf, the magic doesn't affect you. Yes, that is completely arbitrary, and yes, it implies that the mercenaries are stupid, since anyone could deduce that if you are fighting off slavers and rescuing slaves you're doing it on behalf of said slaves.
And it gets worse: after some experimentation, one of the Karmans discovers that the shrinkage and pain induced by fighting the slavers is balanced by the good deed of defending her people. It doesn't kill after all. Instead, her lost fat is replaced by...muscle! Right.
There's also a Cthulhu subplot which seems to be merely an excuse for a bad joke.
On top of the plot problems, the book is full of annoying writerly errors, as when first-person narration suddenly encompasses things the narrator couldn't know:
"If you're ever there, you both are welcome to look me up at Bulfinche's Pub, in New York City," I said. Randor or Buzz assumed that Earth was Loki's home as well...
(Murphy knew this how? A magic thought bubble appearing over their heads?)
There are moments when Murphy goes brain-dead:
"I guessed that he was related somehow to the Greco-Roman pantheon, just not that he had once been its head."
How dense does someone who's buddy-buddy with several gods in the Greco-Roman pantheon have to be to not make the connection between a Greco-Roman god with thunder-and-lightning powers and a habit of picking up women while incognito and Zeus?And then there are the puns, which are not exactly Callahan's-quality: "Members of the Tulu religion are known to truly love their craft." Jokes that spoil their own punchline by leaving out a vital word: "Apparently logic didn't apply here. It wasn't because we were equal opportunity employers, we just apparently had no job to offer it." Peculiar similies: "to hide my concerns like so many rotten Easter eggs..." And, of course, there are disturbingly lively body parts: "Their eyes met and exchanged awkward pleasantries."
Finally, while I hate to nitpick proofreading, the book is full of annoying little grammatical and spellcheck-induced errors, like "Balanced scales is an illusion" or "Marshal arts expert." I might give this sort of thing a pass in a better book, but here it just adds to the impression that both author and editor are careless.
Thomas' series is published by Padwolf Press, about which I know nothing except that it has one of the most annoying websites I've ever seen in publishing. I am generally eager to support small presses and new(ish) authors, but in this case I just can't recommend the book.
If you must buy it anyway, here's a link (below left). But instead, I recommend reading the dated (Prohibition-era, which means drinking to excess is considered absolutely hilarious) but still entertaining Thorne Smith novel, The Night Life of the Gods
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