The Sword Edged Blonde is the first book in the Eddie LaCrosse series and was released in 2007.
Eddie, a former courtier who has lived in self-imposed exile for years, is persuaded to return to his homeland to help his old friend Phil — or as he's more widely known, King Phillip. Phil's wife, Queen Rhiannon, stands accused of killing their baby son in a gruesome magical ritual, and just about everyone thinks the case against her is solid — except King Phil himself, who still loves his wife and thinks someone is trying to frame her. Rhiannon herself has always claimed to be an amnesiac, unable to remember anything of her life before meeting Phil, but when Eddie meets her, he's sure he recognises her as someone from his own past. The book follows Eddie's attempts to link the current situation with weird and unpleasant things in his own experiences that he'd rather forget about.
The Sword Edged Blonde provides examples of:
- Annoying Arrows: Played with a bit. First, Eddie meets "Spike" (real name Allison), who has an arrow permanently stuck in her neck — she has been advised that removing it would probably kill her, so she tries to make the best of it. Later, when Eddie shoots Canino, it appears that Canino might survive, but another character who wants Canino dead pulls the arrow out so that the wound will bleed, making it fatal after all.
- Batman Cold Open: The book begins with Eddie being hired for a relatively typical assignment: retrieve a teenage aristocratic runaway who has fallen in with the wrong crowd in a rough border town. This serves to show the kind of unglamorous thing that Eddie normally does, before the book moves on to the main plot (which involves royal infanticide, cults, and goddesses.)
- Become a Real Boy: The goddess of horses made three attempts to live like a human. The first and second attempts went wrong. The third attempt was to incarnate as Rhiannon, making herself an amnesiac so that she could live free of any memory of being a goddess. However, the fact that she can't remember doesn't mean that she can't be found by someone who hates her from her first disastrous attempt.
- Camp Gay: Tanko, the interior decorator who gives Eddie information about the villain's lair, deliberately adopts this image because it's expected of his job (and because his rich male clients wouldn't let their wives near him otherwise). He is genuinely gay, but not inclined to be flamboyant.
- Can't Hold His Liquor: Andrew Reese was the violent version of this — pleasant enough company when sober, but a violent would-be rapist as soon as he got hold of liquor. It's the root cause of all his troubles, and therefore, of the whole book.
- Due to the Dead: To test a theory that Phil's son wasn't actually killed in the supposed ritual, Eddie wants to crack open the tomb. Objections are raised on the grounds that it wouldn't be proper, but Phil agrees to it — and insists on being present, since then he'll know it was done respectfully. Eddie was right; the bones, on inspection, aren't those of a human baby.
- Flashback B-Plot: As Eddie makes his way to a small village in the mountains, the book alternates between Eddie's journey in the present and his recollections of his first journey, years ago.
- Friend on the Force: Bernie, one of Eddie's old mercenary comrades, is now head of law enforcement in a city where Eddie needs to find a certain criminal. They naturally help each other out, but don't end up fully in accord — there's a supernatural aspect to the criminal which Eddie doesn't want to reveal. Bernie indicates that he'll probably get over his irritation eventually, but right now, it would be best for Eddie to leave town.
- The Good Chancellor: Emerson Wentrobe, advisor to King Phillip, is loyal, helpful, and dutiful.
- The Good King: King Phillip of Arentia (Phil, to the protagonist) is the popular ruler of a prosperous, peaceful kingdom (which contrasts with much of the rest of the world). This is relevant in determining the villain's motive.Eddie: Somewhere out there, you've got one hell of an enemy.
King Phil: Who? Arentia hasn't been at war for nearly fifty years. The crime rate's lower than it has ever been. We don't even have a death penalty anymore. And I don't mean to sound egomaniacal, but everybody seems pretty happy with the job I've been doing. - Heroism Won't Pay the Bills: Self-inflicted, but nevertheless present. Eddie won't let King Phil do anything more than cover his expenses on the case, since Phil's an old friend. Moreover, it turns out that the smaller case at the start of the book has moral issues which prevent Eddie from finishing it, so he refunds that money too. A nice-but-tactless barmaid wonders if he's in the right job.
- Hidden Elf Village: In the extended flashback that makes up a considerable portion of the book, Eddie accompanied a messenger to a small community hidden in the mountains, cut off from just about everything (and centred on the worship of a certain living goddess). The arrival of the messenger turns out to mean the destruction of the village, since it was a signal to a mercenary secretly embedded there for that purpose.
- Human Sacrifice: Since Queen Rhiannon was found with what appeared to be the remnants of a baby in a pot surrounded by occult runes, the obvious conclusion is that she killed her son as part of a magical/religious ritual. She didn't — the baby was kidnapped and the Queen was framed.
- I'm a Humanitarian: Queen Rhiannon stands accused of boiling and partly eating her own child as part of an occult ritual. Since she was found with a pot containing bones, was coughing up chunks of meat, and the baby was nowhere to be found, most people consider the case against her to be airtight, but her husband the King refuses to believe it. She didn't do it; someone just went to a lot of trouble to make it appear so.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: Queen Rhiannon has always claimed to have no memories of anything whatsoever before the day she met her future husband, King Phillip. This doesn't matter much until she's accused of infanticide and black magic, which naturally raises questions about her character and history. It turns out that she doesn't have any memories from before that because she wasn't originally human, being a goddess who deliberately chose to incarnate as a human without any memory of who she really was.
- Malevolent Mutilation: Andrew Reese (a.k.a. "the Dwarf") was disfigured, broken, and deformed, being physically twisted into a new shape which left him in permanent pain but unable to die. It was a punishment after he tried to rape someone who was actually a goddess in human form and was then dumb enough to take his anger out on an animal she cared for.
- My Greatest Failure: Eddie is haunted by... well, several things, but the biggest is the time he let his girlfriend (a princess, no less) be attacked and killed by a band of thugs. Most people think his failure was just not being able to protect her, but it turns out his culpability was greater than that — Eddie was actually the one who escalated the confrontation to violence, out of pride and desire to impress his girlfriend.
- Offing the Offspring: Queen Rhiannon is accused of doing this to her baby son as part of a ritual, but the King doesn't believe it and gets Eddie to investigate.
- Rebellious Princess: The small job Eddie takes at the start of the book is to retrieve a princess who has either been kidnapped by bandits or else run away with them due to foolish notions of romance. It turns out that she's neither kidnapped not deluded — she's not really the biological daughter of the king in question, and consequently has an unhappy life which she's trying to get away from.
- Replacement Goldfish: It actually takes years, but due to flashbacks, it seems quicker. Eddie's attraction to Cathy Dumont was cut short when she is murdered along with everyone else in town, but later, someone with the ability to arrange such things arranges for Liz, Cathy's sister to walk right in. Eddie realises that Cathy and Liz aren't the same person, but since Cathy wasn't actually as right for him as he might have thought, that isn't necessarily a problem.
- Ritual Magic: What Queen Rhiannon's apparent infanticide looks like it was in aid of. In fact, there was no infanticide and no ritual — Eddie notes quite quickly that the "runes" which were used don't have the same characteristics of real ones he's seen, and suspects that any proper cultist would think they were gibberish.
- Taking You with Me: When Canino gets shot, Gretchen pulls the arrow out to ensure that he bleeds to death. This leaves Canino enough time to stab her before he goes, but she doesn't seem to care.
- Tampering with Food and Drink: Done to a whole village by Stan Carnahan, who had been paid by Andrew Reese to hang out there for months until a certain signal was given. The poison doesn't kill directly, but incapacitates well enough that one person can kill the whole lot without resistance.
- Who Wants to Live Forever?: This was part of the curse placed on Andrew Reese, the main antagonist — he lives for ever, but since he has also been twisted into a horribly painful form, he considers this a very bad thing indeed.
- Would Hit a Girl: Part of Canino's Establishing Character Moment is to viciously assault his girlfriend Gretchen, who he apparently had a good relationship with (and who certainly didn't see it coming). He did it just to make a point to Eddie — if he's willing to be that needlessly brutal to someone he mostly likes, how much worse is Eddie going to have it?
