January Book Reviews: Nicked By MT Anderson

January Book Reviews: Nicked by MT Anderson

Picked this book up because it was one of the titles on the site formerly known as tordotcom's best of 2024 list. In Nicked, incurably honest Benedictine Nicephorus has a dream of St Nicholas, making him the perfect pawn for the city's leadership. They want to steal the saint's body from its resting place in Myra, and Nicephorus is a perfect representative to send along on the heist in order to pretend the theft is divinely willed...

Do you know, this is the second book I've read in a month where a guy gets talked into stealing a corpse by his gay crush? Excellent concept, they should keep writing them. And as soon as I opened Nicked, I was struck by the excellent prose and solid grasp of the early medieval period and the Catholic saint fraud shenanigans (1087, to be precise). The overall setting is strictly historical and based on real accounts rather than fantastical--except for the author's mischievous decision to include a character who has the literal head of a dog, because cynocephales were mentioned in medieval geographic accounts.

The romance subplot is subtly done enough that I spent most of the novel wondering whether the author was aware that he'd written Nicephorus as attracted to their conman guide Tyun and commit to the bit. Spoiler, he does. It's clear that Anderson doesn't come from a romance background, but that unfamiliarity lends the romance a certain freshness and originality, rather than making it clunky.

A subtle and dryly funny gem of a novel with whip-sharp observations on a real historical event. Thoroughly deserves its inclusion on the best of 2024 list. Recommended.