Nothing except moving and getting married in the same week could have stopped me from reading this book when it came out July 8. As it happened, I only got my grubby paws on it a couple days ago and tore right through it. 
 First, some background. This is the 11th book in the adventures of Vlad Taltos. The story started with a book called Jhereg, originally published in 1983 and now reprinted in a collection with the next two books in the series. Here, we were introduced to Vlad Taltos, an "Easterner" (human) living in the Dragaeran Empire (humans call them "elfs," they call themselves "human"). Vlad works as an assassin and minor crime boss when we first meet him. He's intelligent and witty, brash and wise-cracking. He hates Dragaerans, who have always looked down on him for being an Easterner, though he has a number of close friendships with individual Dragaerans. He takes pride in his Eastern heritage, to the extent that he practices Eastern-style swordplay and witchcraft, but other than his grandfather and his wife, doesn't associate with or have sympathy for his own people. 
 Over the course of the early novels, Vlad had all sorts of capers, often solving some mystery and getting out of some jam, with the help of his friends. One of the charming things about Vlad, I think, was the way that he did have to rely on friends to get anything done: his relationships with others were essential for the stories and for the success of his plots. Over the course of the first five novels, we see Vlad become gradually estranged from his wife, who starts to develop a sense of class consciousness and works to help better the plight of Easterners and other oppressed elements of the empire. This puts her at odds with the criminal organization that Vlad works for (and which she used to work for as well), ultimately leading Vlad to betray the organization in an attempt to save her, even though they are estranged. The sixth, seventh, ninth, and tenth novels have carried the story forward from there, showing Vlad on the run from assassins. In these novels, we see him as quite a different character than he was at the beginning of the series, matured in several ways. 
 As he has done several times before with new novels in the Taltos series, Brust dips into Vlad's past, this time to fill the gap between the fifth book and the sixth (though there could very well be more space). Brust does an excellent job bridging that gap not so much with plot as with character development. Sure, there's a whodunit sort of flavor to the novel, but the primary interest comes from Vlad's development. He's dealing with the dissolution of his marriage, he's working to come to terms with his Eastern heritage, and he's getting by without his criminal network or his good friends. What's particularly masterful about Jhegaala is the way Brust manages to get back into Vlad's character as he was six books ago and reconcile him to the character we've seen in later books, paving the way for the further changes we see in those volumes. 
 I can't say that Jhegaala is anywhere near my favorite in this series, but it certainly stands as a worthy addition.