The RIB: This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews
Imagine waking up in your favourite fantasy world. Except, what if it's Game of Thrones? And what would you do? Try to warn Ned? “Don't take the job!” Help Tyrion? Try not to change the plot? Except portal fantasy is deliberately designed to allow outsiders to mess around with the plot, ever since there was A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. In Lost in Austen, a television miniseries, the protagonist is spectacular in how she messes up the plot of Pride and Prejudice.
And in This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me, Maggie wakes up in the world of her favourite book series, on the streets. She's got no money, clothes or resources.
But she has a secret weapon. She knows the Plot. Her strongest weapon. Except, while she's read books 1 and 2 to death, book 3 was never published, so she doesn't know all the twists or how her favourite fantasy series ends. And she's going to change things, for the better. Or so she intends.
Anyway, part of the fun of this is seeing how Maggie can leverage her knowledge of the Plot to change the world. She's got some issues - if she changes the Plot, her ability to see the future isn't worth it any more. So she resolves not to change too much, but then, as her relationships with the world and the characters deepen, she focuses on preventing a murder that has a bunch of horrifying repercussions.
Maggie pulls some cash together, meets some characters that she knows (but don't know her), and establishes herself as an information broker.
One issue with the story is that there's a lot of info-dumping; I mean, Maggie has read these books and we haven't, so she'll do lots of exposition to explain characters, situations, and plots. (I'd love to have seen Andrews or even another author, having written a straight fantasy series, the later mess things up with an isekai character visiting that world.) Another thing is that the character sits around, wide-eyed, as she narrates their backstory to them, or the Plot. And they don't interrupt. (This never happens while running D&D).
Anyway, the backstory is dense. Sometimes, when a character's true identity was revealed, I went, “Who?” and had to search back through the book to review the context. Definitely one of those will work better in a re-read. But everything is tightly structured, and there's payoff for all the info dumps and plot drips. It all fits together nicely, like Lego.
But for all these issues, I couldn't put it down and even felt a pang of regret for having ended the book. It ends on a cliffhanger, and I'm definitely going to get the next one to see how it unfolds.