Ace Books, 240 pages
So I've been desperately wishing for a series that fills the void left between installments of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, something featuring a cynical, hardboiled private eye investigating the weird and supernatural. Something from the Nightside has reminded me that, while I was right to wish for all of that, I should have added a caveat to my wish that the resulting book also not suck. John Taylor, the protaginist, has all the cynicism of Phillip Marlowe, but none of the humor, all the guts of Harry Dresden, but none of the charm or loveable nature. But the author goes to great lengths to tell the reader that John Taylor is, above all, TOUGH and DARK. Men fear him, women want him, and he's so dark he probably farts bats.
Green adopts a "tell, don't show" method for explaining how hard-as-nails his PI creation is, with other characters shuttering in fear at Taylor's approach. What makes his so dangerlicious? Hell if I know, and I read the book. Taylor's only power seems to be his inner third eye, his "private eye" (and yes, that is what Taylor calls it, repeatedly, no matter how much I swear at the book in protest) which allows him to see the truth of things, kind of, a little bit...it depends. When he's really hacked off he can, apparently, see the hell out of something, like a door, and thereby destroy it...just by really SEEING at it. Weird. Expect a tragic romantic entaglement that only exists because the genre formula demands it, a sufficiently grey ending to keep with the book's mood and a TOUGH, DARK boatload of sequels full of TOUGHNESS and DARKNESS. Fin.
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