The Market of 100 Fortunes is a beautifully engaging fantasy mystery by Marie Brennan set in the multi-author sandbox Five Rings world. Released 20th Feb 2024 by Aconite, it's 336 pages and is available in paperback, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout.
The Legend of the Five Rings world is a re-imagined "sandbox" setting with multiple authors and tie-ins, based on a roughly Feudal era Japan with the addition of dragons, magic, and political fantasy. Besides the fiction, the original setting was used for fantasy RPG, collectible card game, and even LARPing. There was also a D&D tie-in published as part of the third edition rules, called Oriental Adventures, which is now out of print.
That has, more or less, nothing whatever to do with this mystery. Despite being the third mystery featuring these main characters, it works perfectly well as a standalone, and despite a large cast of characters, it's relatively easy to keep them all straight. The writing and especially the characterizations are beautifully rendered and three dimensional. The setting is organic and smooth and with literally thousands of pages of canon, it's as much a main theme of the book as the primary characters.
Four stars. Readers who want to do a deep dive will never run out of background reading material. Conversely, readers who just want to enjoy a well written mystery will find themselves richly rewarded here.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
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