City of Bones was originally published in 1995 and its reprint is due to come out in September 2023. This is an updated and revised version, and I’ll be basing my review on the galley copy I received from NetGalley. (This is a heads up in case you come into the review and immediately go, “Wait, that’s not what I remember happening!” I’m not sure how different it is, because I’ve only read City of Bones once, years and years ago and I did not retain very much.)
Khat and his partner Sagai are semi-legal, semi-illegal relic traders. They would be completely legal scholars if they could but the city they are operating from has a very rigid social structure, they’re both non-citizens, and Khat isn’t even considered to be a person because his species (krismen) was created by Ancient Mages to survive in the post-apocalyptic Waste surrounding the city.
Khat and Sagai are approached by a Patrician who wants their help to find an Ancient Relic. (The Patrician turns out to be a young “Warder”–magic user–named Elen who is extremely clueless due to privilege and general naivete. Khat is not initially very impressed with her, but she slowly begins to show signs of developing a Clue. Elen’s teacher believes that the relic is a key to keeping Warders from losing their minds, which is a hazard of the kind of magic they use. What it is…is not that.)
This leads to a quest to find the relic and find out what’s for. It also leads to a veritable cascade of discoveries about the Ancients. Such as the part where the Ancients were at war with Eldritch Energy Beings from another world who kicked off their invasion by giving the Ancients lots of knowledge (that incidentally corrupts and drives mages crazy). And also the part where the Ancients were barely able to fight them off and at least one of the Eldritch Energy Beings survived and is attempting to let its friends on the other end of a dimensional gateway through.
The B and C plots involve Khat’s dispute with a relic dealer he used to steal for, and One of The Reasons Why Khat is Like This. (Khat is definitely a template for Wells Angry Traumatized and Marginalized Characters. This is not to say he isn’t his own character. He is absolutely distinct from later characters such as Moon from The Books of the Raksura and Murderbot from The Murderbot Diaries. He just has a lot in common with Moon, Murderbot, and even Kai from Witch King.)
The B plot is that the relic dealer wants him to go back to working for him, but Khat would prefer not to and is having to resort to choosing violence to express this since the dealer won’t take no for an answer. The C plot is that there is a krismen embassy that is trying to find him. Our Protagonist is the only survivor of his lineage and his relatives want him to go home and have kids. (Unfortunately for them, Khat has decided that depriving his victim-blaming uncle of grand-niblings is the Best Revenge.)
This book is a bit like a cross between an Indiana Jones movie and a Road Warrior-type movie. It’s an adventure novel with excellent worldbuilding and lots of moving pieces in the plot between the various plot threads. I liked the interactions between Khat and his partner, and his partner’s family. I also liked Elen, but probably not as much as I liked Khat. (She needs to have a better sense of her privilege and to know more about the world outside her little Patrician bubble before I can really enjoy her as a character. As it was, as much as I liked her, because she’s sweet I also wanted to smack her because she was clueless.)
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