James Nicoll Reviews

A. J. Demas’ 2018 One Night in Boukos is a standalone novel that shares a setting with the author’s Sword Dance secondary universe series. 

The Pseuchaian city Boukos is home to a thousand brothels. Small wonder that the town hosts the Psobion festival, which offers participants the opportunity for extensive debauchery. The festival is a new and alarming thing to most of the Zashian embassy … but not to the ambassador, his Excellency Zukohashkra. He’s in town to negotiate a trade deal between Boukos and Zash and intends to take full advantage of barbarian delights.

The slave eunuch Bedar accompanies Zukohashkra to a party but finding it not to his taste, returns alone to the embassy quarters. He assumes that Zukohashkra can find his own way home. 

Zukohashkra does not.

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2021’s Saffron Alley is the second novel in A. J. Demas’ Sword Dance secondary universe series.

Having survived an incompetent foray into terrorism mounted by students of Eurydemos, ex-soldier Damiskos returned, at least for the moment, to bureaucratic duties in the city-state of Pheme. His new lover Varazda returned to his household in Boukos. Now it is time for what may be Damiskos’ most dangerous mission ever: venturing to Boukos to meet Varazda’s family.

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2019’s Sword Dance is the first volume in A. J. Demas’ Sword Dance secondary universe series. 

Once a promising soldier, now reduced by injury to holding down a desk as a government functionary, Damiskos is dispatched from great Pheme, seat of empire, to the villa of an old friend, Nione Kukara. His task? To negotiate with the retired Maiden of the Sacred Loom a contract for fish sauce. Hardly the stuff of international intrigue. 

So one would think.

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