David Scrimshaw reviewed Tsalmoth by Steven Brust
It's a long way from the first, but worked as a starting point for me!
5 stars
Cory Doctorow told us we should read Steven Brust's novels about Vlad Taltos and this one in particular, and Cory Doctorow is high on my trust list. [Doctorow's Review]
Of course when I start a series, I try to get the first book. In this case, choosing that book is tricky because the first published, Jhereg, apparently would be fourth in the timeline of the books, while Taltos is chronologically the first.
And neither of those books was available to me from the public library anyway, so I went with this one. I'm sure I didn't catch on to things I would have caught if I'd read any of the 15 books before this, but I enjoyed the book thoroughly and look forward to reading as many of the other books in the series as I can.