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Finished a new book from the New Books shelf at the library.
The Alchemist in the Shadows by Pierre Pevel is a translation from the French original published by Editions Bragelonne (and it's really annoying when translated books don't include at least a little note on the copyright page giving the original language title, although this one is easy to guess), which got picked up by sf/fantasy publisher Pyr Books' Prometheus imprint.
If you've ever wondered what The Three Musketeers would be like with dragons in it, then this is your book.
Long story short: Cardinal Richelieu is in charge of France and both internal and external forces plot against him and the country, so he has a special elite force of agents, the Cardinal's Blades (in addition to the regular musketeers) who foil said plots. Namely, those of the ancient dragons, which seek to control Europe by replacing human rulership with, well, dragons in charge by means of secret societies using human agents. Apparently instead of the Inquisition, Spain now has dragons.
This is apparently book 2 of at least 3 (book 1 won both Grand Prix Imaginaire and Prix Imaginales, which are moderately prestigious Francophone sf/f awards). Though the story within is reasonably self-contained and pretty much starts and wraps up in this installment, it's also fairly clear that it's also a chapter in a multi-part saga. But it was pretty easy to follow without prior knowledge of the setting or characters.
It's a relatively short but fairly dense book (281 pages), with the sort of large-ish Dumassian cast of characters each with their twisting and ultimately intertwining plot threads and plenty of intrigue and undercover work and just plain backstabbing involved.
Medium-high recommend if you're looking for something of the type. I liked it well enough that I'm going to look up the first book in the series at the library (and perhaps see if I can also find them in the original French to compare the translation).
Minor note: when characters shout at each other, they SHOUT IN SMALL CAPS WITH NO QUOTATION MARKS, which kept making me think that the Discworld's Death was having some sort of schizoid playacting conversation in those scenes.
And on a similar faux-Dumassian fantasy theme, now onto Steven Brust's latest published installment in the Vlad Taltos series, Tiassa, which apparently brings in some of the faux-Musketeer characters from his Phoenix Guards spinoff.
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