Rating: 
Summary: Amazing!
Review: This book was just brilliant! it's full of surprises and characters who view the world with their own cynical humor that makes this book a favorite. from the first page you're drawn into an amazing world of rogues, theives, assassins, all retaining their own sense of honor that gives these characters their own definitions. It's a great read and I strongly reccommend it.
Rating: 
Summary: All in all, it wasn't horrible.
Review: I find myself saying with alarming regularity that a book could have used a good editor. Sometimes I mean the author needed a fact checker, at other times I mean that the author could have used an expert at story structure and reader accessibility to help with the writing. This book needs one of the latter
I read this book when it first came out and thought it was ok for a pseudo-medieval fantasy but it was just one of many. It didn't inspire any interest in the rest of the series although I did pick at least one up and read a chapter or two before being distracted. Recently, however, I listened to the unabridged audiobook. The reader, Raymond Todd, gave it truly heroic effort, but hearing the book out loud crystalized for me what was wrong with the writing and probably why I have never finished another one of the author's books.
Admittedly this was a first published book-- but the amount of exposition in the first two thirds of the book is mind boggling. Alec kept having these conversations about the way the world-- his world! worked so the reader could be clued in on information. It would have been better had the author woven most of this into the story rather than large chunks of plodding exposition. Also, if we are to accept Alec's viewpoint as the reader's veiwpoint-- a sort of Watson character-- then it would have been better had the author stayed out of the other characters' heads this early in the story. Then there was the mulling over of things. For instance, there is a whole scene where, after being attacked by bandits, the party sits down and discusses at length what they learned from examining the effects of the dead bandits. And it took them so long to arrive at the inevitable conclusion that I wondered that any of them had ever survived engagement in political intrigue before.
Finally, after a long, uncomfortable and harrowing journey, Alec is told that it wasn't really necessary, it was sort of a character building exercise. That really ticked me off. I would have liked Kerry a lot better if he had just stalked off at that time with a hearty good bye!
As for Seregil-- there's not a lot that can be said about Seregil that isn't a spoiler, However, he is just not as charming and interesting as one expects a man of mystery to be.
Then there are the canoodling wizards and the apprentice whose purpose can be seen a mile way.
All in all, it wasn't horrible but it could have been a whole lot better.
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining
Review: Like many people, I have some mixed emotions. To get the record straight, I really enjoyed this book! I thoroughly enjoyed it and it's one of those books I end up reading till 4 in the morning so I can finish it. The characters are fun, if not entirely original, and it was like a jolly romp through Flewelling's world.
From another perspective, I can see how people criticize her "hit em over the head" approach to writing in her frsit novels. It lacks some of the finesse that I would require of a book with this potential, and like I've seen others point out, we're expected to believe kind of whaterver she throws at us as plausible.......like the folding longbows. Thus certain areas in the book you can see where Flewelling loses her grasp on the material because she might not be as able as in other areas. On the bright side though, I laughed quite often in this book. Some of the dialogue is very funny.
As a note on the series, I'm not a big fan. The first book is the best because the characters are new. For me, everything else goes downhill from there. I found my interest in the characters waned as the stories continued.
Also, I much more enjoyed her later Tamir series because they are much better edited and organized than in this series. The Luck Series being her first couple of published books I'd say it's an entertaining good start.
Rating: 
Summary: Trite archetypes, simple plot, & one intriguing character.
Review: One original character trait barely carries "Luck in the Shadows" through hackneyed fantasy archetypes. The orphan boy Alec teams up with the dashing thief Seregil after they escape a dungeon cell. They flee to Seregil's home city under the pursuit of evil foreigners, but upon their arrival this plot vanishes in favor of political intrigue. The sly thief characters blossom in the urban scheming, making the evil necromancer plot feel tacked onto the beginning as fodder for the sequel. Fantasy clichés abound: the rural orphan boy hero, the venerable wizard Nysander, and evil necromancers seeking ancient artifacts. Alec matures into his role, but the harried rush to the conclusion dilutes the earlier focus on his growth. Seregil's ambiguous sexuality provides the only flash of originality. Flewelling subtly builds this trait with Seregil's scheming in Wolde and his manipulation of the riverboat captain, and she appropriately omits it from dialog until Seregil reunites with friends like Nysander outside of Alec's hearing. These interactions hint at the burgeoning attraction Seregil may feel for Alec, but a reader aware of this plotline in advance may catch several musings in the first few chapters that appear to foreshadow an eventual relationship between them, even at this uneasy initial stage. Flewelling's prose clanks along with rare flashes of vividness. The early chapters drag with info-dumps, yet combat is glossed over with scant detail. The dialog sputters with modern colloquialisms, and the dialog attributions stumble with adverbs. The prose often shifts to a new paragraph when inserting a sentence of description into a character's dialog, jarring the reader when the same character continues speaking in the new paragraph. "Luck in the Shadows" straddles the fast plot of adventure fantasy like Raymond E. Feist and the character-focused, introspective style of Robin Hobb's Farseer Trilogy. The unique relationship growing between Alec and Seregil could have formed the ideal core for a character-focused work, but "Luck in the Shadows" buries this original spark under bushels of stock fantasy trappings.
Rating:
Summary: Five stars for this highly enjoyable book!
Review: LUCK IN THE SHADOWS is the perfect tip-off to the Nightrunner series. I was hooked by the second page and could not put this book, or the next two in the series down. I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes contemporary fantasy. Reasons I adored LUCK IN THE SHADOWS:
+ It was very simple and entertaining to read but it was also clever and witty and amusing and satisifying.
+ The main characters are very interesting and endearing in the way they create mischief and scamper around and are spies, nightrunners, aristocrats, and thieves.
+ The battle of good vs evil was very much at the forefront especially in Skala vs Plenimar, but the cliche did not take away from the plot or mar the book as a polar good vs evil theme does in many fantasy books.
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