The Blacktongue Thief is a lot of fun. The summary lays out the plot pretty well. Cynical and very in-debt junior thief Kinch is given a Quest to join up with the knight Galva, journey with her, and foil her quest at the orders of her guild. It's a standard long journey across dangerous lands, with a prize at the end.

But two things elevate this book. The first is Kinch's first-person narration, which is funny, opinionated, perceptive and partially blind. He's a bad person but a good friend. The second is the world-building as revealed over the course of the book. There are many human nations, but all of them have been devastated by the Goblin Wars, a series of conflicts on the scale of a demographic collapse that saw humans drafting women and a plague which rendered horses extinct. The grasping ambitions of the Taker's Guild and the weird workings of the various mages Kinch encounters on his journey shin like poison gems against this falling world.

Read this, you won't be disappointed.