[polishgenius]

NOTE: Low Town is the US title of the book, The Straight Razor Cure is the UK. Judging by the way it's presented on the UK cover, Low Town may also be the title for any planned series, but I don't know.


In his debut novel, Daniel Polansky serves up a solid brew of romantic-criminal derring-do mixed with a healthy dose of fantasy noir whodunnit. Warden is an ex-soldier, now a drug dealer in his little corner of the Low Town slums of the city of Rigus. World-weary, he just wants to sell his product and watch the days roll by. But when children start getting kidnapped and killed in strange ways and the authorities are powerless to stop it, he discovers he's not as cynical as all that and decides to help solve the case.

First things first; The Straight Razor Cure is fun, pure and simple. Despite the grimness of the root plot and the aforementioned noir influences, the book is full of witty banter and larger-than-life characters, and moves along at pace. Warden isn't the most original character in the world, but as a first-person PoV he grouches entertainingly, and Polansky manages to make him a badass without being an unstoppable killing machine, and clever without being an unstoppable genius. He makes mistakes, and pays for them. He's also at least slightly mad, which makes things interesting.
He's ably abetted by the supporting cast. Again, they're not enormously original, nor hugely realistic, but they're not meant to be: you'll like the ones you like, hiss at the ones you're supposed to hate and have good fun doing so. They also give interesting circles for Warden to operate in, despite the almost cartoonish presentation, he bounces off them in interesting ways. This book almost certainly heralds more, and as the kind of series that will live and die on its supporting cast it's definitely got off on the right foot.
All this is delivered at pace with wit and verve of prose; you may almost not notice as the story flashes by but Polansky writes well, without ever getting so showy that it interferes. And when the action comes, it's down, dirty, and doesn't outstay its welcome.
The cons: the whodunnit aspect of the plot is neither especially compelling nor particularly difficult to work out, and you'll be waiting for Warden to catch up with you. Also, the worldbuilding of the city itself doesn't match up to the people in it; while Polansky's way with words means it's well presented, the city is for the most part little more than a place for the plot to happen. This might not be a con for everyone, but I'd liked it to have a bit more personality than it did.
Also, while the plot certainly self-contains, several parts of it don't have a great deal to do with the here-and-now central strand and are very clearly setting up future stories. As I mentioned, I like the characters, and it never flags in pace while it's setting these things up, so I'm not complaining, but since it's not a long book by genre standards it leaves the main strand feeling slightly short-served. Hopefully, this will pay off in the future.

All in all, however, those are niggles; this is one of the debuts of the year and heralds a series definitely worth keeping an eye on.

[Abyss]

Rumour has it this is rather overtly 'part 1 of whatever' rather than relatively self-contained.
Confirm or deny?

[polishgenius]

Confirm. Kind of.

Like I said, there is a plot that is wrapped up in the book, it doesn't end on a cliffhanger or truncate any story threads, but it's very blatantly setting up for later on in places. Think as if Harry Dresden had popped in for chats with Michael and Mab in the first book, sort of thing.

[Coco with marshmallows]

My feeling regarding this whole book was that he was trying to avoid common fantasy tropes by writing a 'hard-bitten private investigator' story.

He kind of succeeded, but in avoiding the fantasy tropes he instead nailed every 'hard-bitten private investigator' trope instead.

which is a bit of a shame.

still, I thought it was an entertaining enough read.

Not brilliant, but i'll probably pick up the sequel when/if it appears.