Readers
who pick up Joel Rosenberg and Raymond Feist’s collaborative novel Murder
in LaMut expecting either the epic fantasy of Feist’s Magician
or the swashbuckling adventure of Rosenberg’s Not
Exactly the Three Musketeers will find themselves disappointed.
Despite being set in Midkemia shortly after the events of Magician,
the book barely touches on the Riftwar, instead focusing on the city of
LaMut as it is isolated from the rest of the world by a blizzard.
The
authors spend the majority of the novel setting the scene, introducing the
characters, and, almost incidentally, providing a variety of motives for
different possible murders. Once
the actual murder occurs, they shift gears to make the novel a murder
mystery, although not a typical one, which is what sets Murder in LaMut
apart from so many other mysteries.
One
of the more interesting parts of Murder in LaMut is that in a world
which has no tradition of investigation, the three main characters must
create the techniques so familiar in our own world via mysteries and
television shows. In some
ways, the creation of investigative methodology is a little strange since
the readers have a better idea of what the three characters must do.
The fact that Feist and Rosenberg have them follow standard
practices rather than create new techniques is something of a letdown.
The
authors provide an interesting look at the difference between justice and
punishment in the denouement. While
not all aspects of their revelations are entirely satisfying, the authors
do manage to pull of a good mystery with enough plot twists to satisfy
and, at the same time, raise some philosophical questions concerning crime
and punishment.
As
a shared world experiment, Murder in LaMut is intriguing.
Set in Feist’s popular Riftwar world, the three protagonists are
taken entirely from Joel Rosenberg’s Guardians of the Flame series,
although there is no reference to their exploits in that world, or even
their origins beyond Feist’s comments in the acknowledgements.
While the majority of readers will probably pick up the book
because of its setting, it may well introduce them to Rosenberg’s
writings as readers track down the other adventures of Pirojil, Durine and
Kethol in the above mentioned Rosenberg novel or its sequels, Not
Quite Scaramouche and Not Really the Prisoner of Zenda.
While
it would have been nice to see more of Feist’s world and the background
which he created in Magician and subsequent books, the fact they
those details don’t impinge directly on the action in LaMut means that
such intrusions would have been obvious as winks by the authors and would
have worked only to drop the reader out of the narrative.
On
a personal level, one of the main characters in Murder in LaMut is
named Steven Argent, whose name could be translated as Steven Silver.
However, I checked with one of the authors and was assured that the
character was not named for me, but rather for another popular author.
Murder
in LaMut is
neither a “Riftwar” novel nor a “Guardians of the Flame” novel,
which works to the novel’s benefit.
The two authors have brought together their strengths and creative
powers to produce a novel which is reminiscent of both of their styles but
which neither could have created in this form without the input of their
partner.
