In the city of Ethshar by the Rocks, the best supplier of materials for wizard spells is Gresh, whose worldwide network of contacts, friends, and trade secrets has give him the reputation as a man who can find anything a wizard might need. So when Tobas, a young wizard whose miscast spell went horribly awry some years ago, is ordered by the Wizard’s Guild to rectify the matter, he goes to Gresh. The job? Find the enchanted mirror which is the origin of all spriggans in the World. The payment? Just about anything Gresh can think to name, within reason and sanity. The problem? The spriggans are indestructible, immortal, mischievous creatures, who stole the mirror years ago to protect themselves from people who’d try to destroy them all. The bigger problem? The realization that if the mirror isn’t dealt with, someday in the future the World will be overrun by the little green nuisances. Gresh, with his reputation to uphold, and a hefty payment on the line, takes the job, and soon narrows down the area in which to search. Together with Tobas and Tobas’s two wives, Gresh now has to find the mirror, wrestle it from the multitudinous hands of the spriggans, and decipher the secret of its power, so that the threat of spriggan overpopulation will be curtailed once and for all.

Of course, the spriggans don’t plan to make it easy. And as everyone knows, messing with magic can be dangerous, foolhardy, and sometimes even suicidal. Will it be enough to break the mirror, or can they disenchant it? Can they reverse its effects, or are they stuck with the spriggans for good? Worse still, what’re the ethical ramifications of trying to wipe out half a million sentient — if annoying — magical beings? What starts off as a simple retrieval operation swiftly becomes a complex moral issue for which Gresh has no ready answers. All he knows is that his conscience may not let him finish the job easily. And that’s before the mirror is tampered with, and an additional twist is thrown into the equation. . . .

As with almost all in the Ethshar series, the main crux of the plot stems from magic gone wrong, and the complicated ways in which it can get even worse. In this case, The Spriggan Mirror actually picks up from a plot point in an earlier Ethshar book, With A Single Spell, and follows up on the characters first introduced in that book, though the focus is on Gresh, who’d only been mentioned in passing before. Watt-Evans certainly has a great magic system set up in the Ethshar series, with its multiple forms of practictioning, its rules and limitations, and its creative, sometimes whimsical spell names. It’s attention to the little details about what a spell can and can’t do that helps fuel much of the suspense and complications as the plot progresses, as well as providing some amusing moments along the way.

I’ve always enjoyed the Ethshar series, with its varied settings, intriguing characters, unstable and volatile magic, and fast-moving plots, and The Spriggan Mirror lives up to the usual standards, offering an entertaining, thought-provoking story. It’s nice to find an intelligent non-epic fantasy book that can stand alone, while still being part of a larger world, without relying upon massive amounts of bloodshed or violence to keep the masses occupied. The Spriggan Mirror is more then welcome on my shelves, where it’ll join the rest of the series, and I definitely recommend it to those seeking a good, solid, well-told fantasy adventure.