Just Finished Reading Daniel Abraham's The Tyrant's Law

Reading Daniel Abraham's The Dagger and the Coin fantasy series is, in some ways, the antithesis of that of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time.  The former keeps the characters and story lines limited in number and easy to follow, while the latter is overly encumbered with minor characters often dominating the text for long passages.  I definitely prefer Abraham's work, and just finished the third volume, titled The Tyrant's Law...and have already gone a few chapters into the next one, The Widow's House...

I read up a little on Daniel Abraham on the Internet, and if what I uncovered is to be believed (and I don't have any persuasive reason to think otherwise), he is primarily a science-fiction writer who decided to try out writing a fantasy series like his friend, writer George R.R. Martin.  He reportedly got together with Martin and some other writers to get down the essence of this genre...and subsequently laid down an outline for this five-part series.  Now that's something I doubt that Robert Jordan ever did.  There are a lot of derived themes in The Dagger and the Coin, such as a distant past with dragons once dominating the picture, but also there are two innovations as I see them.  One is the diversity of humanity in the form of thirteen distinct races...and they are much more different from each other than the so-called human "races" we think of in our real world and over which have created such a fuss throughout history (and even now, sadly).  The other is the corruption of a segment of humanity with little spiders running through their veins, the effect on them being that they can distinguish truth from lie as well as giving them Jedi-like powers of persuasion.  Well, maybe that last feature WAS derived, wasn't it?  This conspiratorial group drives the story line in the series as they try to take over Abraham's imaginary world...

As in other fantasy series, the main characters of Cithrin (a young female banker), Geder (the "tyrant", besotted with Cithrin), Clara (widow to a nobleman who unsuccessfully tried to assassinate Geder), Marcus (war hero from bygone years who goes on various adventures), and Kit (an apostate from the spider-people group who is on his own quest to destroy them) spend the book crisscrossing the lands and seas in their various narratives.  Even with the welcome limitation of characters, it can get to be a little bit tedious trying to keep up with all these wanderings, but I am holding out the hope that the author will stick with his plan to conclusively tie it all up in that yet-to-be-published fifth book...