I mourn. This is really sad, especially since your positive reviews meant that I was, at some point in the future, going to start reading these. I was quite interested in how Brust's 'hard-boiled fantasy' would compare to Scott Lynch who is currently making the fantasy heist genre his bitch. What are your thoughts - if you have any. I guess from your reviews it just struck me - perhaps entirely unjustifiably - that were doing something, on some levels, quite similar.

By the way, this made me laugh: rendering me a small child sat in the back of the Brustmobile kicking the back of Steve's seat and whining "Are we nearly there yet?".

Just because a series starts getting wobbly around the 8th book doesn't mean you can't enjoy the first seven, surely? I think the Vlad Taltos books are well worth reading even if you have advance warning from the Canary about when they're going to sink into mediocrity.

What Rami said. As I point out in the review, the good thing about Dragon is that it seems to be an entirely optional episode in the series. I'm still, after all, going to read the ninth book when I can pick it up, simply because the first seven books were so good I'm holding out hope that Dragon was merely a mid-series hiccup instead of an actual sign of the way things are going.

Also, there's a big reveal at the end of book seven, so if you read the first seven books (the ones that got put out in the nice compilations) and then stop it's as reasonable an end point as any.