[astrange]

I think his stock "evil ethnic yet cosmopolitan assassin with conspicuously foreign name" characters are kinda weird. (In Inferno it's a woman named "Vayentha" working for a guy named "Zobrist".)

This might be a literary SF trope. One of the silliest was in Tad Brown's Otherworld[0], which has an evil yet cosmopolitan Aboriginal Australian assassin.

[0] it's like a literary SF version of Sword Art Online, and if this makes it sound weird it's a lot weirder than that

[musicale]

Haha, Tad Brown indeed. He did inspire A Game of Thrones and, uh, Eragon. However, this kind of makes me want to pick up Otherland (?)

[astrange]

edit: Tad Williams