A more thought out summary
These are basically Steven Erikson playing around with putting two haughty necromancers and their poor manservant into common fantasy settings. The whole thing is written with humor in mind, kind of like how you can read a normal Terry Pratchett sentence and wonder if that's some word play or not. The first one is a police procedure set in the Malazan equivalent of Ankh-Morpork, the second one is on a pirate ship and the third one is uh not sure how to summarise that one. All in all a good read, and you don't need to have read the other Malazan books to understand, and you won't be spoiled of anything either. It's a valid entry point into the series I think, but it's also much more light hearted, although the density of the prose and the number of characters carries over.
