You know, I thought about asking in the other conversation if you'd read this, but don't seem to have gotten around to it. I think there's a good chance you'd like it, especially if you didn't bounce off Brust's style in Dragon. (I gather that the series' blend of high fantasy and detective/mafia/noirish tropes is not everyone's cup of tea.)

Anyway, it's a good one to read on its own because it's unusually self-contained for this series, as it takes place chronologically before most of the other books, and several of the main characters meet for the first time in this book. It also has a really interesting structure and hits a bunch of tropes that go straight to my id.