The Assassin's Blade

This book is collection of novellas ranging from the beautiful and inspiring to the dark and depressing.

While it is a collection of different stories, the narrative does flow between them in a novel-ish way, there are no significant time jumps and events from one section feed directly into the next. That said, I found the feel of the stories are radically different. Without too much of a spoiler, I found the first tale to be an awesome adventure, the desert based tale to be at times beautiful and moving. The final two city-based stories however became steadily darker and more disturbing - not to my taste.

As they are so different I think it's only fair to break things down:
• The Assassin and the Pirate Lord. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
• The Assassin and the Healer. ⭐️⭐️⭐️
• The Assassin and the Desert. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (beautiful)
• The Assassin and the Underworld. ⭐️⭐️ (too predictable)
• The Assassin and the Empire ⭐️ (predictable and way too nasty for my taste)

To summarise, I'm really glad I read this book for the Desert tale, but by the end I was glad to finish. I may come back to read another in the series at some point, but right now I need something different to get over that extremely dark ending.