Books like Myth-ing Persons / Little Myth Marker

Again this is two-books-in-one, which makes it a bit harder to review than otherwise. I also find that my reactions to them were very different. I had read them before, I think one time and certainly not more than twice, and remembered some of that, which had some impact on my appreciation. It is the fifth and sixth books in the series; I have previously read and reviewed the first four.The first (that is, fifth) book, Myth-ing Persons, introduces Luanne as a recurring character. She had a brief appearance in the first book of the series, but without a name--she was the female of the con artist couple Skeeve and Ahz portrayed as a deal with a Deveel. Now she's the girl of Skeeve's dreams, and seems smitten and a bit overawed by him, which would be the perfect set up for a romance--except that she and her two companions managed to make him responsible for their scam on Deva by escaping through a back door in his office into another dimension he and Ahz had never explored. Ahz manages to leave Skeeve behind to attempt to bring them back, and her partner Vic manages to fake his own death and frame Ahz for murder--but Luanne has the courtesy to return to that back door to let Skeeve know his partner's in trouble. The rest of the story is about efforts to capture Vic to prove Ahz is innocent and square the problem with the Deva merchants association about the scam. The complications are that this particular dimension is notoriously short on force lines (the source of magic in the series) and the home of vampires and werewolves. Vic is one of the former, and true to Asprin's style he rewrites all the tropes in a way that explains why vampires have the reputation they have but aren't really like that--in this case, the vampires you meet in other dimensions are all arrogant eccentric wealthy tourists; at home most vampires drink the bottled blood of livestock, not fresh blood from people's necks.Interestingly, although I remembered a lot of the story as it unfolded, I did not remember any of the twists or surprises in this one (or at least, not many) despite this, I did not enjoy it so much as others in the series, and wondered whether he was slowing down or whether it was just that the story idea wasn't working for me. I've read worse stories, certainly, but this one did not hold me very well.In contrast, with Little Myth Marker, I remembered nearly all the significant twists and plot points almost from the first page, and yet found myself eager to read it. In this one, we are introduced to the concept of the game of Dragon Poker. There is almost enough about it in the book to set up a basic game--it plays like poker but with six card hands in which all six cards are part of play, so that a strait or a flush has one more card in it, and three pairs, three of a kind twice, and four of a kind and a pair are all ranked hands. The deck, though, is not adequately described, as reference is made to the ogre and unicorn cards in each suit without clarifying whether these are extra cards or different names for existing ones. Beyond that, we are given to understand that there are hundreds of complicated rules that change play based on everything from what day of the week it is, to which way your chair faces, to what number hand it is, to what cards are face up. Right at the start Skeeve plays a game at a local club because he was invited, having no idea how to play but somehow winning. He agrees, in a friendly way, to accept the marker of another player, and finds himself saddled with a little girl named Markie. She is immediately trouble, because little girls can cause all kinds of trouble--and she seems specially equipped and talented to cause more than her share. Meanwhile, there is another addition to the household, as the mob's Fairy Godfather Don Bruce has decided to send his niece Bunny to fill the position of Skeeve's "Moll", because every mob boss needs to have a gorgeous girl on his arm and Skeeve, after all, does see to the mob's interests on Deva (a long story from a previous book). Between Markie and Bunny life is in chaos at Skeeve's mansion--and then word reaches them that someone has hired The Ax, the most notorious "character assassin", to destroy Skeeve's reputation. Of course, Bunny is immediately suspect, as things have been going wrong since she arrived, but the situation is much more tangled than that. Word of Skeeve's success at Dragon Poker has also reached the ears of the world champion, the Sen-sen Ante Kid (yeah, that's what it's like sometimes), who has issued a challenge which Skeeve finds himself obliged to accept to preserve his reputation even though he still knows nothing about the game.Eventually Skeeve figures it all out, exposes the real Ax, befriends the Sen-sen Ante Kid, and incidentally helps a few people and punishes a few villains along the way. It also sets us up for future stories with the team working together, which will appear in future books.The series remains fun and highly entertaining, with Asprin's quirky creativity building clever twists on the tropes of fantasy. I recommend the series, although I recommend (as I always prefer) the reader begin with the first book, rather than jumping in here.