Fencer Trilogy: The Proof House - K.J. Parker

The Company - K.J. Parker

Years ago there was a war. Five men fought together as 'linebreakers'; an incredibly dangerous job that threatened their lives every day and paved their way to riches and fame. The war ended, they moved on and got on with their lives and left their brutal past behind them. All except one. The book starts when this last member re-enters their lives with the aim of persuading them to reconsider a plan they had though up years before. He wants them to move, with everything they need, to a deserted island where they can set up a settlement of their own and begin a new life together. All practicalities are considered, wives found, supplies bought, and the move made. And ...

The Scavenger Trilogy: Shadow - K.J. Parker

This story starts with a man lying in mud and blood, half in and half out of a small river, surrounded by corpses and, thanks to a knock on the head, missing his memory. Acting on instinct, cautious to a fault, and with absolutely no sense of direction or intention, he makes his way as best he can into the brush. His prospects don't look good, and indeed, they aren't. The protagonist lurches from one minor calamity to another, with a fair number of major calamities mixed in for seasoning. All he wants is peace, quiet, and some hint as to who he is. But almost every encounter ends (if it doesn't begin) with violence, and though he keeps blundering into people whose first response ...

Scavenger Trilogy: Pattern - K.J. Parker

Having trampled his way through the lives of several dozen people, unwillingly terminating most of them on the way, Poldarn, amnesiac protagonist of Parker's mordant and enthralling story, finds himself 'back in the Olde Country'. For, at the end of book one, Shadow, he was restored to the bosom of his loving family. Not, mind you, that it's as loving as all that. Poldarn's folk, the Viking-esque raiders who live on two great isles far out in the ocean, turn out to be a most peculiar people. Each small community, each little farm or hamlet, is a hive-mind all of its own. Everyone lives inside everyone else's head, telepathically intimate with everyone's needs and quirks, a ...