I’m continuing with my current M.O. of choosing the shortest unread books in my possession to read first. Clocking in at just over 200 pages, The Dead Cat Tail Assassins by P. Djèlí Clark was a fun, breezy read.
The story takes place over one night in the city of Tal Ibisi. It follows Eveen, an undead assassin who works for the titular Dead Cat Tail Assassins organization of hired killers. She accepts a contract where she is only given an address, but when she arrives at the location, realizes that something very strange is going on. The assassin’s guild is of the “we don’t fail jobs or else bad consequences” variety, so she spends the rest of the evening trying to figure out what’s going on, and to achieve an outcome that doesn’t result in her being tortured for eternity.
Despite the somewhat dark subject matter, this book was a lot of fun. There’s a lot of worldbuilding packed into a relatively short book, and Eveen is frequently quite a funny character (I loved her Zombieland-esque list of “Assassin rules”).
My one gripe about this book relates to some of the dialogue near the end, where a fairly lengthy plot critical conversation occurs. My understanding is that one of the characters has a different accent to the others, and this isn’t captured (in my opinion) in the best way in the writing. It made it somewhat difficult to understand what was happening, was very lengthy, and I didn’t think it added much to the story. It mostly just annoyed me as I found myself having to re-read the character’s lines and puzzle out what they were trying to say while I just wanted to read through to the conclusion. It’s a relatively minor thing and didn’t greatly impact my enjoyment of the book, but it probably knocked at least a half-star off of my rating.
Overall, I liked this, and would recommend if someone is looking for a fun, short, standalone fantasy novel.