James J. Butcher

The marketing for this book leans into the author's parentage a bit, so I feel that makes it fair game to comment that, unfortunately, James J. Butcher is not Jim Butcher. While, for me, his father's books are something to anticipate and read immediately, this one only managed to keep my attention.

The concept for the plot is fine: a hunt for a MacGuffin while solving a murder shrouded in mystery. The execution of that story line could use a little tweaking because you pretty much suspect the "surprise" villain from the early pages, but he isn't the first author to allow that, and it shouldn't bother you all that much. The fact that the MacGuffin turns out not to be totally a MacGuffin was welcome.

The world is interesting, though world-building is a little sketchy. Other series with "magic among normals" settings, like the Dresden books or Kim Harrison's Hollows books, leave you with a far better sense of the backdrop after their first volume. I needed the Unorthodox, the Department, Elsewhere, etc. fleshed out a bit more in order for the world to come alive. Maybe subsequent volumes in the series rectify this.

The stilted dialogue was a little harder to overlook because it kept throwing me out of the story. For example, real people do not use names and/or epithets in every third line when addressing another—that's something reserved for Wesley talking to Humperdinck in the ending of The Princess Bride. Butcher could have cut out 90% of the ", witch" instances, and it would have been far less jarring to the ear.

But the real issue I had with this book is the characters. Grimsby, in particular, kept making these sophomoric attempts at humor. Not only were most too juvenile to be funny, they were inconsistent with the "panicked guy" character finding himself in that situation. The fundamental problem, in my opinion, is that they weren't written as tics of a frightened mind. That would have been fine. But Grimsby was far too self-satisfied in delivering his snarky one-liners to be convincing as the character he was supposed to be.

Mayflower, well, he just never really managed to carry off the "tough guy" persona to live up to his apparent legend ... not that we have any idea of what the legend surrounding The Huntsman actually is. And that lack of idea probably contributes heavily to why he fails to emerge from two-dimensions into a real character in the reader's mind.

And motivations? Why was the villain doing what he did? Why was the villain's sidekick/patsy doing what he did? Why, other than plot convenience, did so many people do what they did?

Oh, and using the epilogue to drop the name Elizabeth Bathory onto a character that heretofore has been a good guy is either a heavy-handed spoiler alert or extraordinary mis-casting.

So, in summary, if you want ... inevitably ... to compare this with any of his father's series, it doesn't fare well. If you want to compare it to Kim Harrison's series (since she wrote the cover blurb), it doesn't fare well. If you can manage to do none of those, then it's neither good nor horrible ... a beach read for a little escapism, but not something to hunt for the next installment with bated breath.… (plus d'informations)