...an inspired piece of literary gymnastics...The Relic Master is a smart, tart, well-researched romp into one of history’s most irresistibly grubby and outrageous periods of excess.
[T]here’s plenty of fighting and fakery, deceit and rationalization, to go around. The political posturing, religious hypocrisy, and some of that old-time self-satirizing humor should entertain everyone.
This scene — it being the age of miracles — is actually and finally funny. But it has taken well over 300 limping pages to get here. Some fast-paced, relatively engaging action provides a conclusion, but it is small recompense for having slogged through so many, many pages of pro forma humor, rackety plot and inane chitchat.
