欧宝娱乐

You know, the premise of this book actually sounded good. A wizard P.I., sure why not. I like wizards and I like P.I.s, so what could be the problem. The problem was I over estimated this author's abilities.

The main character is like some kind of emotionally retarded uber-geek's idealized life. He lives in a basement and subbasement. He ALWAYS wears a black duster and cowboy boots (even when he's wearing sweats and a t-shirt). He has an abnormally large alley cat that likes to drink coke and doesn't get violently ill from the caffeine. He can't get anywhere with women, for no real reason at all. The first woman that broke his heart, he actually killed (but for good reasons, I mean she was evil). I could go on and on. The protagonist of this story is an immature weiner. He is a walking dorky cliche, that feels like he is some kind of Peter Parker wizard. Constantly bemoaning the weight of the world on his shoulders, even when its actually not on his shoulders. Add to this the characters inability to have basic levels of trust for his friends/allies, lack of common sense, and a very low level of intelligence for someone that relies on brains and willpower for their strengths. And you end up with a guy that is very annoying to read in most any situation.

Now throw that character into a Noir Detective style situation. This is not a confident man, nor is he a physically tough man, and he lacks much in the way of street or even book smarts. I find it highly unlikely that this guy should have survived past the first 100 pages, let alone through all the other blunders he makes through the entire book. Take a gander back to the beginnings of the Noir Detective genre, and you'd be ashamed that this man besmirches the genre's good traditions. Sam Spade has no magic what so ever, but he could quite easily have out smarted and out fought this guy with his bare fists.

Don't even get me started on how annoying magic is in this book. Not since the magic of Terry Brooks' Shanara books have I felt magic meant little to nothing. This guy is constantly like, oh shit I don't have my wand or staff or special ring, so if I do my magic now I'll kill everyone. What the fricking good is magic that can't be used unless you've got your stick of power. If magic is going to be used the way it is in this book, as basically a crutch to hold the rest of the weak aspects of the book up (as it is in most non-awesome fantasy); then at least have it around to do its job and make cool things happen.


So to close, this book is immature and not fun to read. There was a time in my life when I would have found this book awesome, when I was going through that phase of life where you're 13, emotionally retarded, and just discovered AD&D 2nd edition. Which there is nothing wrong with, that's a phase that me and most other nerds went through. Then we grew out of it, because we matured in to adults. But this book isn't be lauded to me as "great writing" by 13 year old nerds and geeks, its being held up as a "Great Book" by adults, and that's who its marketed to. Look if you like this book and you're in Junior high then fine (though I could recommend better things for you to read that are aimed at your age group), but not adults. If your an adult and you think this is even just "good" writing (and again I'll state that most tell me its "great" writing) then I think you need to try reading some other stuff by much better authors. Go find and read Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, Joe R. Lansdale, Walter Mosley, Warren Ellis, or Charles Stross. These are all writers that have written either modern fantasy/Horror or Noir and/or Crime fiction, so they are working on some similar concepts. Then if you don't find those to be far better book written by actual good writers, well then I'm just going to have to say that you and I may be from different planets or something.

This book is not fun to read. Its poorly constructed. The plot is about as complex as 6th grade math, and less original than that. The characters are 2 dimensional at best. Magic is used a focal point of the story rather than something to enhanced the flavor of original and real feeling plots and characters. At one point the author describes someone by saying he looks like Sean Connery's character from the Highlander, instead of I don't know just describing the dude as having a pony tale (since that was where those two character's physical similarities ended). Most of his other descriptions of characters are like police descriptions of people being given to me by the narrator which completely takes you out of the narrative. The author at one point even wrote "I was a wizard" when his point of view character is lamenting about going into a house or building to solve a problem and I was thinking "wait did you stop being a wizard at some point?". If you're going to write in the first person perspective then learn to write in the present. Of course one would expect a decent editor could have fixed this, but I'm going to assume that decent editors get assigned to decent writers. Look, its not a good book. I didn't make it a bad book, it just is. I'm told that the book get much better after or on book three (so some day I hope to get a copy of his second book for free and see, though I have my doubts since I've read enough bad authors in my day to know they don't usually start becoming good authors, just more experienced bad authors) but that's a really spurious argument since I need ALL book I read to be good if not great right away. I'm not going to recommend an author to someone because his first work was really awful but if you just read two more books by him he gets good. Well then perhaps he should have just started with book three and spared us the bad books. Its bad and I don't recommend it to anyone who's not reading it as a goof to lampoon it in there own head. End of statement.