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Tricked (Iron Druid Chronicles) Mass Market Paperback – April 24, 2012
Kevin Hearne (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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“[Kevin] Hearne is a terrific storyteller with a great snarky wit. . . . Neil Gaiman’s American Gods meets Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden.”—SFFWorld
Cutting a deal with a trickster god rarely goes well for any human brave or foolish enough to try it, but Atticus doesn’t feel like he has a choice. With members of the Norse pantheon out for his blood, he can’t train his apprentice in peace, so he asks Coyote to help him fake his own death. The cost, however, might wind up being every bit as high as if he’d made no deal at all.
There are things hiding in the Arizona desert that don’t want any company, and Coyote makes sure they know Atticus has arrived. And then there's the hound of Hel, Garm, who’s terribly difficult to shake and not at all convinced that Atticus is dead.
Being tricked by a trickster is par for the course. But it’s the betrayal from someone he thought was a friend that shakes Atticus to the core and places his life in jeopardy. The real trick, he discovers, might be surviving his own faked death.
Includes Kevin Hearne’s novella “Two Ravens and One Crow”
Don’t miss any of The Iron Druid Chronicles:
HOUNDED | HEXED | HAMMERED | TRICKED | TRAPPED | HUNTED | SHATTERED | STAKED | SCOURGED | BESIEGED
- Print length368 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherDel Rey
- Publication dateApril 24, 2012
- Dimensions4.14 x 0.91 x 6.83 inches
- ISBN-100345533623
- ISBN-13978-0345533623
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“[Kevin] Hearne is a terrific storyteller with a great snarky wit. . . . Neil Gaiman’s American Gods meets Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden.”—SFFWorld
“[The Iron Druid books] are clever, fast-paced and a good escape.”—Boing Boing
“Hearne understands the two main necessities of good fantasy stories: for all the wisecracks and action, he never loses sight of delivering a sense of wonder to his readers, and he understands that magic use always comes with a price. Highly recommended.”—The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
“Superb . . . plenty of quips and zap-pow-bang fighting.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Celtic mythology and an ancient Druid with modern attitude mix it up in the Arizona desert in this witty new fantasy series.”—Kelly Meding, author of Chimera
“[Atticus is] a strong modern hero with a long history and the wit to survive in the twenty-first century. . . . A snappy narrative voice . . . a savvy urban fantasy adventure.”—Library Journal
“A page-turning and often laugh-out-loud funny caper through a mix of the modern and the mythic.”—Ari Marmell, author of The Warlord’s Legacy
“Outrageously fun.”—The Plain Dealer
“Kevin Hearne breathes new life into old myths, creating a world both eerily familiar and startlingly original.”—Nicole Peeler, author of Tempest Rising
About the Author
Kevin Hearne hugs trees, pets doggies, and rocks out to heavy metal. He also thinks tacos are a pretty nifty idea. He is the New York Times bestselling author of The Iron Druid Chronicles, the Ink & Sigil series, and the Seven Kennings series, and is co-author of The Tales of Pell with Delilah S. Dawson.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The best trick I ever pulled off was watching myself die. I did a respectable job of it too—the dying, I mean, not the watching.
The key to dying well is to make a final verbal ejaculation that is full of rage and pain but not tainted in the least by squeals of terror or pleas for mercy. This was my father’s wisdom—about the only shred of it that has managed to lodge firmly in my mind all these years. He died while trying to steal somebody else’s cows.
It would be an ignominious end today, but before the common era in Ireland, it was honorable and manly to die in a cattle raid, as such theft was called. Before he left to meet his doom, my father must have had some dark premonition about it, because he shared with me all his opinions about dying properly, and I will never forget his final words: “A man’s supposed to shit himself after he dies, son, not before. Try to remember that, lad, so that when your time comes, you won’t make a right girly mess of it. Now f*** off and go play in the bog.”
Like many silly codes of bravery and manliness, the meat of my father’s instruction on how to die well can be distilled to a simple slogan: Die angry at maximum volume. (Dying silently is out of the question; the world’s last Druid should not go gentle into that good night.)
During infrequent spates of morbidity, I used to speculate on my eventual manner of death. I figured it would happen on a city street somewhere, cut off from the power of the earth, unable to summon a magical mulligan that would let me see the sunrise. But at the same time, I hoped it would be in a cool city with a bitchin’ name, like Kathmandu or Bangkok or maybe Climax, Michigan. I never thought it would be in a dried-up place called Tuba City.
Situated in the southwestern portion of the Navajo Nation in Arizona, Tuba City rests on a red sandstone mesa with no visible means of economic support. The first question I asked when I saw it—besides “Where are all the tubas?”—was, “Why is anybody living here?” The red rocks may have a stark beauty to them, but beyond that Tuba City is nearly treeless, dusty, and notably lacking in modern amenities of dubious worth, like golf courses and cafeteria-style dining. It does have a reservoir and some pastures nestled into a canyon, but otherwise it’s puzzling why nine thousand souls would adopt an address there.
On the north end of town, where the BIA Road intersects with Indian Route 6220, a large white water tower juts out of the desert. It overlooks a few dilapidated trailers on the very edge of the city, and then there is naught but a rocky mesa with scattered shrubs gamely trying to make a living in a few inches of sandy soil. I’d flown to the top of the tower as an owl, carrying a wee pair of binoculars in my talons, and now I was camouflaged in my human form, lying flat, and peering northeast into the barren waste where I was about to die.
The dying had to be done. The Morrigan had seen it in a lucid vision, and she doesn’t get those unless it’s really dire and inevitable, like James Earl Jones telling you in his Darth Vader voice, “It is your desss-tiny.” And, frankly, I probably deserved it. I’d been very naughty recently and, in retrospect, epically stupid. Because I couldn’t bear to break my word, I’d taken Leif Helgarson to Asgard to kill Thor and he managed to pull it off, but we killed a few extra Æsir in the process and turned Odin into a drooling vegetable. Now the remaining Æsir were slavering for me to shuffle off my mortal coil, as were several other thunder gods who took Thor’s demise as a personal affront to all things thundery.
After building flaming funeral ships for their dead and resolving to avenge them—for some people approach vengeance like an all-you-can-eat buffet—the Æsir sent Týr and Vidar after the surviving members of our company. I had no idea where Perun or Zhang Guo Lao were hiding, and I hadn’t an inkling of whether Hrym and the frost giants ever made it out of Asgard. Leif was safe, because they saw Thor smash his skull with Mjöllnir; thanks to the peculiar regeneration capabilities of vampires and the dutiful attentions of Dr. Snorri Jodursson, Leif hadn’t quite died, but it would be some time before we knew if he’d make a full recovery.
I, on the other hand, wasn’t safe at all, because I had people to look out for. Perun could spend the next century as an eagle and they’d never find him. Zhang Guo Lao, I’d heard, was capable of true invisibility when he stood still; since he could go full ninja, they’d never get him either. I could go to a nice plane somewhere and be safe—I could even take Oberon and Granuaile with me—but without true contact with the elementals of earth, Granuaile wouldn’t be able to advance her training as a Druid, and the world desperately needs more Druids. So my choices were to stay on earth and die or leave earth and let the world slowly die of neglect—which wouldn’t truly help, since all planes connected to earth would die at the same time.
I decided to stay and die. Loudly.
Týr and Vidar found me quickly enough once they knew who to ask for. I’d blown my cover somewhat spectacularly some months earlier by killing Aenghus Óg, so by now almost anyone paranormal or supernatural could have pointed them to Arizona. They chased me up to Tuba City, towing along five thunder gods for backup: Ukko from Finland, Indra from India, Lei Gong from China, Raijin from Japan, and Shango from Nigeria. All of them are very powerful gods and quite beloved by their people, but few are the tales in which we hear of their wit or perception.
Indra was quite the character, for example, and undoubtedly the most powerful of the lot currently. He had a reputation for lovin’ the ladies, a tendency I couldn’t criticize myself, but he got himself into some awful trouble for it once. He chose to lay down with the wife of a magician, who of course found out immediately that Indra was “in da house” and assigned him a punishment worthy of Dante: Since the thunder god could think of nothing but vaginas, the cuckolded husband cursed Indra with a thousand vaginas all over his body. Indra had to walk around like that for a while, until Krishna took pity on him and commuted the sentence by turning all the vaginas into eyes. Still, think of the optometrist appointments.
The Morrigan observed, “They may be sharing the brain of a nuthatch between them.” She was perched on the water tower beside me in the shape of a battle crow, making sure that I “died” precisely as her vision foretold. We’d both been worried initially about her vision of my death—she because it meant she’d break her oath to keep me alive, and I for obvious reasons—until I remembered the Plan. I’d conceived the Plan before the Morrigan shared her vision with me but realized only later that the Plan could fulfill her vision of my death without me actually having to die for it. Now we watched with faint amusement as someone who looked like me cursed the circling thunder gods and asserted that they all were spawned from the puffy red asses of baboons. The gods sent bolt after bolt of lightning at him with no apparent effect as he stood in a puddle of mud.
“Give them a little credit, Morrigan,” I said. “They found me here, after all.”
“Only after you allowed them to by parading around this foolish copy of yourself. It still took them a week, but, very well: They are sharing the brains of two nuthatches.”
The Atticus O’Sullivan they assaulted was a near-perfect replica. The tattoos on his right side were a precise copy of mine. The slightly curly mane of red hair would have shone luxuriantly in the sun had it not been pouring rain on him, and the goatee blazed with character on his chin. He was foulmouthed and had his Irish up, and he had my wallet and my cell phone in the pockets of his jeans. There was an iron amulet on a silver chain around his neck, with five square charms on either side of it and a fulgurite talisman in the back protecting him from the lightning. The fulgurite was real, but the amulet and charms were little more than costume jewelry. He did, however, carry Fragarach in his right hand—the real Fragarach, not a facsimile—for extra special verisimilitude.
Yet a clever enemy would not have been fooled. He didn’t have Oberon or Granuaile by his side, for one thing, and he wasn’t casting a single Druidic binding—not that this bunch would know it if he did. They were still trying to fry him electrically.
“What are they thinking?” the Morrigan asked. “If the first hundred lightning bolts don’t work, the hundred- and-first one will?”
“That strategy would require them to count,” I said, “which is improbable if they’re sharing two nuthatch brains.”
“Good point,” the Morrigan conceded.
Týr, the Norse god of single combat, waved off the thunder gods to approach my double with a shield and an axe. Vidar, Odin’s son, armed with a long sword, followed close behind. The thunder gods floated down to the muddy earth behind the faux Atticus to cut off any escape.
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Product details
- Publisher : Del Rey (April 24, 2012)
- Language : English
- Mass Market Paperback : 368 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0345533623
- ISBN-13 : 978-0345533623
- Item Weight : 6.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 4.14 x 0.91 x 6.83 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #98,404 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #669 in Humorous Fantasy (Books)
- #3,512 in Fantasy Action & Adventure
- #8,266 in Paranormal & Urban Fantasy (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

KEVIN HEARNE hugs trees, pets doggies, and rocks out to heavy metal. He also thinks tacos are a pretty nifty idea. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling series the Iron Druid Chronicles, the Seven Kennings trilogy that begins with A PLAGUE OF GIANTS, and co-author of the Tales of Pell with Delilah S. Dawson.
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Over the first few books, we've developed relationships with several characters -- Atticus, the POV character (who does appear here, along with his dog Oberon), and his various friends and acquaintances (neighbors, attorneys, a coven of Polish witches, police officers, gods and goddesses, etc.). Although a few of those characters appear in this volume, many are only mentioned as passing references. (Atticus's apprentice Granuaile has a decent role in this one, though, if you liked her. She gets more of a personality as well, and we learn more about her motivation for starting Druid training.)
The mythology in this one is more Native American (Navajo, specifically) as opposed to Celtic. Atticus doesn't always have the strongest tools to deal with the various culture-specific enemies/monsters he comes across and he has to improvise and I like that. Coyote, who has appeared previously in the series, is back. He has made a request of Atticus and it *seems* like his motives here are honest and upstanding, but Atticus is never quite sure, knowing Coyote's trickster history.
In addition to helping Coyote, Atticus has to tie up all the loose ends of his old life and establish new identities for himself and Granuaile. So in the midst of his tasks with the Navajo, he is constantly having to leave to do other things. On one of these tasks, something happens (don't want to spoil it) and Oberon gets hurt. It is agony getting through the next chapter or two -- we want to know what happened to Oberon! Didn't know I could get attached to a dog character like that, whose sole purpose seems to be comic relief, but I did. It was a good place in the series to put a moment like that, too. Atticus's life is changing -- is this small part going to stay the same or is it going to change, too?
There's an interesting new element, and I can't say it surprises me. Atticus and Granuaile seem attracted to one another and Atticus is choosing to take the honorable path of not abusing his power as teacher and avoiding romantic involvement in his student's life (though we get the sense that, under other circumstances, he would like to). I will be interested to see where this goes. And the relationship would make more sense than some other couples I've seen thrown together in fantasy novels recently. But we will have to wait for a future volume for that. Another thing I like is that Atticus has doubts about past relationships (not just romantic ones) -- did people truly care for him as a friend/lover/etc., or did they only want to associate with him for selfish reasons? He maintains a generally positive attitude, but it's good to see those cracks in his shell. He's not as much of a male Mary Sue as he appeared to be in the first volume.
The writing style is similar to past volumes. There's a little infodumping on Navajo culture, but it's more cleverly-disguised than usual. Atticus serves as a proxy for the reader, since this is one culture he hasn't lived as a part of prior to this book. So he is learning and observing along with us. I much prefer this to long blocks of description or background information. The banter with Oberon is back, maybe not at its funniest ever, but still decent. Character development is a little better in this book than in the past ones -- there are more emotional moments and background details offered, even for non-Atticus characters. It's limited by the first-person POV, but it's there.
This book seems to have concluded one arc of the series, but I know there are more volumes left. And I am curious as to what will happen next. I can come up with one carryover from this book and the previous one that may continue on in future volumes, but this was most definitely a book of conclusions and endings, as well. (Kind of nice to have one of those in the middle of an ongoing series. A good change of pace, and there's plenty of room for new beginnings, too.)
I'm enjoying this series quite a bit and I'm planning to continue on to the next book pretty soon. I think Tricked is my favorite of the bunch (so far).
In this book he starts walking home in a dark desert with two supernatural hunters after him, instead of pulling out his cell phone (or budgeting his time better). He also gets attacked on the fourth floor of a hotel, why didn't he try for a ground floor room so he's closer to his source of power, and why didn't he bother to put up any wards? If his paranoia is the only reason he's survived this long, it's just a thin cover for plot armor.
Also, I'd like an explanation for why he can absorb energy from the earth but somehow cobblestone acts as a buffer.
The story in this book is fairly ludicrous and contrived. Apart from a few paragraphs at the beginning it does not really advance the main story very much. This I could live with if it did not feel like this story is mostly an ill contrived filler. Worse is that it seems to be put together only to give the author an opportunity to do some preaching about environmental issues and native indian affairs. The semi-bad guy Coyote wants to build windmills and solar power plants. Atticus goes away like some uber-hippie sabotaging coal mines and Granuaile reveals that she wanted to become druid to avenge some relative that is in the oil business? What the f…? That’s just a load of things coming out of the rear end of a bull and certainly not what I want to read about in a book.
Even without these elements the story would not have been very good. We are talking about a 2000 year old druid who is tricked like a schoolboy by Coyote. Not funny. It is a shame really. This 2000 year old thing is really what intrigued me to start the series and could have been used to good effect but it really has just been wasted so far in these books.
These books have all been quite light reading and I was not expecting much in terms of plot but at this point I have serious doubts as to whether I want to continue this series. I am stubborn and really really do not like not to finish a book series that I have started so I probably will but the next instalment better be an improvement over this one.
If you're thinking about buying book 4 you've obviously bought into all that. In this book I enjoyed the addition of rich indigenous myths of the American southwest. There are enough twists to keep you guessing what the core characters of Atticus, Granuaile, and Oberon. If you've not yet fallen in love with the idea of being bonded to your own wolfhound this volume will clinch it.
Top reviews from other countries

In this story, Atticus, the 2100 year old Iron Druid, is found in the Arizona desert fulfilling a promise to setup a native American ecological mining operation. He chats to elementals to get gold moved to the unlikely location, and has to deal with a wide manner of mythical entities, whilst maintaining a low profile, having recently faked his own death. The real charm of the storyline, though, is how he interacts with the other characters, especially his attractive female apprentice, and his surprisingly articulate hound, Oberon. There are various visits from deities such as the Irish gods like the Morrigan, the chooser of the slain, who turns out to be not unlike someone's eccentric hot single aunt. There are some casualties and some native American lore. I suspect the author, who lives in Arizona in real life, most likely was especially careful not to offend any native American readers by being disrespectful of their folklore. Oberon is the star of the show in some ways, as he is the funny man to Atticus's straight man.
I would highly recommend this book to fans of the series and readers who like urban fantasy.

Here we see Atticus repaying a debt to help out some Native Americans and coming up against Native American mythology (instead of the Norse Gods we have met previously) and some bad guys that even he can't deal with. Told as before with both wit and charm and humour from his hound Oberon.
The joy of the previous books was his dealing with a variety of Gods and religions (a brilliant scene with Jesus in the last book) and how they all mingle and share existence (based on the model that Gods gain their powers from belief). Here there is less of that and a story that feels slightly padded, with much of Atticus explaining stuff to his apprentice/the reader. Some of his old friends and alliances are treated rather strangely and even the ending was a little...odd.
So it was okay but not as entertaining or clever as the previous books. Be interesting to see where the author goes next, but he needs to freshen things up a bit and not rely too much on sausage related humour!

This is where the series really begins to turn into dedicated fantasy story telling without the urban elements that certainly the first 2 books possessed.
I found coyote and the main plot actually less interesting than the various sub plots and ongoing story arc revelations.
If you enjoyed the first three then you'll enjoy this one but it's not a high point.


The story is paced well and we get further insight to the past, certain characters are fleshed out and after wrapping up loose ends from the last book it's exciting to see where the next book goes.
Recommend this series to everyone I know. It has great humour, delightful characters, believable settings and is such a fun read I almost want to read each book in one sitting. If you like God's, myth, pop culture references, tense fight scenes, comedy, interesting character development and genuine page turners then this is the series for you.