It’s not so much that I had forgotten about this series, but 2024 was a year I took off from a lot of things, including my obsessively reading things. But as 2025 began to roll around and I decided to restart this blog, the third book in this series serendipitously came into my radar, and I was pretty happy to learn that it existed. I had liked the first book, I had really liked the second one, and I was thus pretty happy to learn about the third.
To review, the Dark Profit series (and I am still tickled by the title) is set in a fantasy world envisaged by an author with perhaps not the healthiest obsession with free market economics. He has taken that interest and superimposed it onto a fantasy world, achieving a pretty comedic effect. It somehow works. Adventuring does seem to be something that would be tied to a stock market of sorts. The series also works, as much of fantasy and science-fiction does, to hold a mirror up to our own society and have us think about the actual world around us.
This third installation focus on a dragon. Not just any dragon, but the dragon that is a vital lynch-pin of the economy of that world. The dragon has a horde of gold, AND If you are getting flashbacks to all those relatives you have that want to talk about how we need to go back to the gold standard, then pat yourself on the back. That is precisely the book you have here, and depending on your reaction to those gold standard conversations with your family members, you may of may not enjoy this book.
It had been a long while since I read the first book, and I must confess as to being lost and not really remembering all the characters when I started to read this one. It impacted my reading, as well as my enjoyment of the first quarter of the book. At some point, I did manage to catch back on.
I will confess that I get a kick out of these novels, but this one was really nothing to write home about. In terms of actual laughs, so far the second novel Son of a Liche, was by far the best. Here, the story was cute. But that is about as much as I can really endorse it. If you’ve read the other ones and enjoyed them, you might as well read this one. If a fourth book comes out, I will read that one too.
Failures in Polymathy 