The Phoenix Guards (Khaavren Romances, #1)

The Phoenix Guards is a fantasy novel by American writer Steven Brust, the first novel in the Khaavren Romances series, set in the fictional world of Dragaera. Like the other books in that series, the novel is heavily influenced by the d'Artagnan Romances written by Alexandre Dumas, and is written by Brust in the voice and persona of a Dragaeran novelist, Paarfi of Roundwood, whose style is a tongue-in-cheek parody of Dumas, matching both his swashbuckling sense of adventure and his penchant for tangents and longwindedness. Brust describes the book as "a blatant ripoff of The Three Musketeers." The Khaavren Romances books have all used Dumas novels as their chief inspiration, recasting the plots of those novels to fit within Brust's established world of Dragaera. The next several books in the cycle are inspired by the subsequent Musketeers books, while 2020's The Baron of Magister Valley uses The Count of Monte Cristo as a starting point.