March Books 6) Under Heaven, by Guy Gavriel Kay
Kay has written some amazing books, but unfortunately this isn't one of them. In Under Heaven he has moved away from his usual fantasy European setting and gone for a barely fictionalised account of a real incident from Chinese history, and for once I felt that his fidelity to the original facts got in the way of telling a good story. The plot is one of political, military and sexual tension; there are a couple of small fantasy elements which are so marginal that it hardly seems worth including them; and there is a poet who, thank god, does not inflict too much poetry on us. It's not a bad book, but disappointing in the context of Kay's earlier heights of achievement.