If you’re a Black Library reader, the name Aconyte Books might not spring immediately to mind. Founded by French game maker Asmodee in 2020 to serve as a vehicle for tie-in IP fiction, it serves effectively the same purpose as the Black Library does for Games Workshop. Little surprise, then, that they looked to Nottingham when setting up their fledgling publishing arm, tapping Marc Gascoigne (himself a co-founder of the Black Library) to helm the new imprint.
If you’re a Black Library writer, however, selling the fruits of your creativity and imagination distilled into ink upon paper, there’s a very good chance Aconyte is on your radar. It certainly was for Josh Reynolds (Neferata, Fulgrim: The Palatine Phoenix), David Annandale (Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar, Dynasty of Monsters), Robbie MacNiven (Outer Dark, Oaths of Damnation), and James Swallow (Flight of the Eisenstein, Nemesis). Each of these Warhammer stalwarts published a novel for Aconyte in that first, founding year for the Arkham Horror, Legend of the Five Rings, Descent, and Watch Dogs Legion properties respectively.
Reynolds himself was busier than a farmer with two snakes and one hoe. His Wrath of N’kai, An Arkham Horror Novel was Aconyte’s debut release, and he co-wrote Watch Dogs Legion: Day Zero with Swallow. Pride of place the following year went again to him, with his L5R debut Poison River kicking off Aconyte’s 2021 stable of releases.
Legend of the Five Rings has long had a special place in my heart. I can tell you that as a comic and game store owner1, shouting UTZ! at the top of your lungs only to be completely drowned out by the answering BANZAI! from the players before an organized play event was a singular joy2.
And so I was particularly keen to check out some of the L5R work published by Aconyte Books, and immediately landed on Poison River for two reasons. First, of course, was the Black Library connection with the author. And second, who doesn’t like a good mystery? At time of writing the character of Daidoji Shin has shown his staying power, with his fifth book, A Bitter Taste, seeing print in August of last year.
Indeed, when recently interviewed for our Six Pack series in the weekly Black Library Weekly column, he was asked to recommend one book he’s written to readers. His choice? 2022’s The Flower Path: A Daidoji Shin Mystery. “I want to write another one,” he noted.
“Or maybe a dozen.”
A Whole New World
The setting for Legend of the Five Rings is, of course, Rokugan, a fantasy version of feudal Japan. For the unfamiliar, it’s a very human-centered world. While there are monsters and undead aplenty, unless you’re in the cursed Shadowlands anything wicked that goes bump in the night is far more likely to be a shinobi.
In this regard it’s not dissimilar from Game of Thrones, whose careful sequestering of the supernatural allowed for a more human drama to unfold. And Poison River is one of the best kinds of human dramas- the whodunnit.
We’re introduced to the City of the Rich Frog, a prosperous human city whose lucrative river trade is the beating heart of commerce. The imperial governor oversees an uneasy peace between the dominant Great Clans, with the martial and aggressive Lion on one bank, the independent and uncivilized Unicorn on the other, and the mystic and enigmatic Dragon between them.
Intrigue and power struggles abound, and when a shipment of poisoned rice turns up in the Lion’s possession, it sets of a chain of accusation and recrimination that threatens to explode into open conflict. In hopes of avoiding catastrophe, the governor turns to the trade representative of the Crane Clan, the feckless aristocrat Daidoji Shin. With the Crane having little footprint in the city outside of a meager amount of trade, the governor reasons, he’s as neutral and impartial an investigator as he’s likely to find.
Shin, who has spent most of his time there half-assing the largely ceremonial post he’s been assigned to, warms to the task as something more worthy of his talents. He’s no seasoned detective like a Poirot or Holmes, but he has a well-honed sense of observation, deduction, and persuasion.
In short, Shin is a character for all of us who load up the skills that give us more dialogue options in our CRPG games at the expense of combat prowess. Reynolds does a terrific job of centering him in the narrative while keeping less-experienced readers along for the ride. You don’t need to know all that much about the world of Legend of the Five Rings to enjoy this one (I refer to this as lore foreknowledge, and discussed it at some length in a recent review of Chris Thursten’s Abraxia, Shade of the Everchosen).
Part of this is how Reynolds writes the book, weaving a little bit of exposition here and there for the bits that will be important to the reader. He also incorporates the technique of a reader surrogate in the person of Shin’s samurai bodyguard, Kasami. She’s sort of the opposite of Shin, a character that took her soft skills points and used them to pump up the martial ones instead.
Reynolds wisely refrains from portraying her as larger than life. She’s no Astartes uber-warrior, but rather a companion skilled with the blade whose hand on the hilt is usually more impactful than a drawn katana for the occasional rough situation Shin finds himself in. Periodically throughout the book she’ll play a Watsonian role of conversing with Shin about the unfolding investigation, allowing the reader to catch up to what’s going on and connect the dots as Shin does.
Here too Reynolds does a terrific job in crafting a rollicking mystery story that keeps even non-mystery readers engaged. He never allows the unfolding story to get too far out in front of the reader, but rather makes sure the reader is ‘getting it’ through conversations and recaps that never overstay their welcome. This isn’t the kind of mystery that becomes increasingly opaque and byzantine until the ending act’s final reveal. Sure, there are still plenty of twists and surprises as Shin investigates the expanding butterfly effect of a petty crime on the docks, but the end is far more “gripping conclusion” than “explaining all the things the reader missed in the last half of the book.”
Final Thoughts
If there’s a discordant note here, it’s in just how contemporary the book feels- and I’ll be the first to acknowledge how subjective that assessment is. Every decade or so I’ll re-read James Clavell’s Shōgun3, and it never fails to captivate me with a setting that feels somehow both relatable and yet deeply otherworldly4.
Reynolds didn’t quite take me away to the Rokugan I was expecting. It was clear that he’d done enough homework to ground himself in the setting, but sometimes there were smaller details that stuck out as generic more than lived-in, such as references to gold coins instead of kōku. I imagine that’s the challenge of any IP writer, since you’re working in a universe that you didn’t create and that many readers may even be more familiar with than some of its writers.
What seemed to break the immersion the most, though, was the dialogue. Some of the bantering and back-and-forth between characters felt very modern, and Reynolds regularly peppered it with modern axioms and sayings. Slogans like “A little learning is a dangerous thing,” “discretion is the better part of valor,” “may your reach not exceed your grasp,” “look what the cat dragged in,” these are common cultural touchstones that act as writing shortcuts because we all understand their meaning, but at the expense of feeling a bit out of place. With just a little nudge serviceable ‘Rokugani equivalents’ could have been substituted (for instance, “some learning can be worse than none”) which would have accomplished much the same effect without taking the reader out of the world.
Overall, though, these are very minor complaints unlikely to detract from the tale in any meaningful way for the majority of readers. And if one of the goals of a first novel in an IP series is to entice the reader to continue to read more, it was mission accomplished. Reynolds not only delivered a terrific character in Shin, but he seemed to set up a great recurring cast of characters that I’ll be sure to enjoy when (not if) I read the next one, Death’s Kiss.
Footnotes
- My wife and I bought Moonlite Comics in Frankfort, Kentucky and ran it for two years. We didn’t plan for our reign to be so brief, but then our fourth child came along (and her little sister shortly behind!). A case of “Father, breadwinner, game store owner: pick two.” It was a rollicking, fascinating white-knuckle of a journey into American entrepreneurship, and provided abundant grist for the self-examinatory mill when a decade later I’d start working on my MBA degree. #NoRagrets
- …and one now consigned to the dustbins of history. Eight years ago the chant was kiboshed amidst a dialogue around cultural sensitivity and inclusion.\
- Or, in the most recent incarnation, stream the 2024 FX series. It was superb.
- Probably in no small part due to the use of Blackthorne as- you guessed it- a reader surrogate.
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