This was not the snarky noir pastiche book I was expecting. It was full on noir -- a protagonist who has just been relentlessly beaten down by the world and everything he hoped for going sour. Fascinating world-building and, if I may say something slightly spoilery, ends with a light note of hopefulness. The next book will definitely be on my to-read list. ( )

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This book was a very pleasant surprise. I picked it up because I liked the pitch what do you do when the magic runs out? and because I was curious to see what Luke Arnold. who played John Silver in 'Black Sails' would make of it. What he made of it was a remarkable start to a new series that I'm now keen to follow.

'The Last Smile In Sunder City' is not your usual fantasy book. It's written in a well-executed Noir style but it's set in an alternative world where everyone but humans and animals had magic -until they didn't. The magic is gone, the world is fractured and most of its residents are living in a state of mournful loss and angry resentment. The resentment part is because the magic didn't just go away, the humans killed it and wounded the entire world.

The book is told from the point of view of Fetch Phillips who is now this world's equivalent of a down-at-heel gumshoe who sees himself as a penitent looking for some opportunity to do good. Fetch is soaked in grief and guilt and self-loathing. His character sets the tone for the book and drives the story, which is part 'solve the mystery of the missing vampire' and part 'reveal my backstory and the sources of my guilt while bringing to life the world that has now been lost'.

It's a sad and thoughtful book that twist tropes hard, not to be clever and glib, but to ask 'what would it be like to have to live in this place, knowing what you'd done?' It's also a book with a decent mystery, wonderful world-building and quite a lot of action. The world and the way the action plays out constantly surprised me. Luke Arnold managed the pace of the novel well, feeding me more of Fetch's past as I need it to understand who he is to other people and why he does what he does and keeping me engaged in solving the mystery, which, like all mysteries in a Noir novel, is not exactly the one Fetch thought he'd been hired to solve.

What makes 'The Last Smile In Sunder City' remarkable is the way Luke Arnold cracks open the hard-boiled Noir shell and steps beyond the usual assumptions of a Fantasy, to show me a broken but not yet defeated man still struggling for redemption, who, in his way, is emblematic of the pain of this world's recent past and who may offer some hope for its future.

his is a book that kept me turning the pages because I needed to know what happened next while still making me think about the world I live in. I found the emotions quite intense It flooded me with an awareness of what grief. guilt, shame and the daily remembrance of loss feel like and warned me how corrupting hope can be.

The next book in the series, 'Dead Man In A Ditch' is already in my TBR pile.

I listened to the audiobook versions of 'The Last Smile In Sunder City' which was narrated by Luke Arnold who gave a splendid performance. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.




https://soundcloud.com/hachetteaudio/the-last-smile-in-sunder-city-by-luke-arnol...



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This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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I think this could be my longest post ever, and I'd still leave things left unsaid, you wouldn't believe the length of my notes for a book of this size. I'll try to hit the most important points. To fill in whatever lacunae appears below, you should probably also read what was said over at Witty and Sarcastic Bookclub, The Tattooed Book Geek, Grimdark Magazine, and FanFi Addict—they're what convinced me to buy the book.

“So, you’re a Man for Hire?”

“That’s right.”

“Why don’t you just call yourself a detective?”

“I was worried that might make me sound intelligent.”

The Principal wrinkled his nose. He didn’t know if I was trying to be funny; even less if I’d succeeded.

“What’s your relationship with the police department?”

“We have connections but they’re as thin as I can make them. When they come knocking I have to answer but my clients’ protection and privacy come first. There are lines I can’t cross but I push them back as far as I can.”

WHAT'S THE LAST SMILE IN SUNDER CITY ABOUT?
Fetch Phillips is hired to find a missing vampire, Edmund Albert Rye, an instructor at an exclusive private school for the children of magical creatures (lycanthropes, vampires, elves, dwarfs, etc.). It's been a few days since he was seen, which is uncharacteristic enough that the principal's getting nervous—he's tough, but he's been unwell. He, the students, and staff just need to know what happened to him.

I made my way east along Fourteenth Street without much hope for what I might be able to find. Professor Edmund Albert Rye; a man whose life expectancy was already several centuries overdue. I doubted I could bring back anything more than a sad story.

I wasn’t wrong. But things were sticking to the story that knew how to bite.

Fetch gets to work, enjoying the feeling of a good amount of cash in his pocket. The first step is the city library, Rye's been living in the attic for that last several years, so he could enjoy some privacy and the sunlight. The librarian is just as worried as the principal had been.

It's really not long before Fetch's investigation brings him to an old private club for Vampires—and he find the remains of a couple of vampires. The lab concludes that it Rye wasn't one of the fresh corpses. There's another dead magical creature there, one that Fetch has never seen, and it takes a couple of days for the results identifying that to come in, too.

One thing that Fetch learns fairly soon is that Rye isn't the only one missing, a girl vanished around the same time as he did. Now, Fetch has to track down a missing vampire and a teen-aged Siren. His work is definitely cut out for him.

Because he knows from the get-go that the story he'll bring back to his employer won't have a happy ending, he has a hard time pursuing it head-on. He keeps finding little things to distract himself, to slow the investigation. Even when the missing girl gets factored in, and he knows he needs to be fully committed just to have a chance to find her, to. He really can't pull it off. The sad story just became so much sadder, and he doesn't want to know the depth of that sadness.

FETCH PHILLIPS
While the majority of the book traces this story, we also get several flashback chapters tracing Fetch's tragic childhood, decent (but not great) adolescence and then troubled adulthood leading up to the point where he helped the Human Army destroy all the magic in the world. It's an event called the Coda, and it occurred six years before Fetch was hired by the school. All magical creatures lost the abilities that distinguished their races, and the world was never the same. As an act of penance that no one but Fetch cares about, he's since refused to work for humans, only for formerly-magic creatures. Which is what brought him to the search for Rye.

Fetch is a broken man—he wasn't in great shape before the Coda, but he's worse after it. An ex-soldier, convicted criminal, ex-prisoner, and now a drunk, with moments of sobriety (fewer than he should have while on a job, but all that money can buy many drinks).

There was a hangover on the horizon, along with something else. Something sort of stupid.

A devil was sitting on my shoulder whispering the kinds of things that stopped working on me years ago. I was only in my thirties but I was old. You don’t measure age in years, you measure it in lessons learned and repeated mistakes and how hard it is to force a little hope into your heart. Old just means jaded and cynical and tired. And boy, was I tired.

It's the penance that drives him. He'd been an author of so much of what was wrong with the world, and he's doing what he can to alleviate it just a little bit. It's the only thing keeping him going. It's not enough, but it's all he has.

Fetch is such a rich character. It's hard to like him, it's hard to find anything redeemable in him*, any reason to be interested in what happens to him. But you can't help pull for this broken, beaten, disillusioned, and cynical man.

* Which is, admittedly, the point of redemption.

WHAT A PIECE OF WORLDBUILDING
This is such an incredibly conceived world. The Coda is so fresh that the citizens have started to move on, but aren't used to dealing with the post-magical world. And so many of them are still hoping that it'll all come back just as suddenly as it left.

The mixture of the fantasy elements and Human tech and science in this world, picking up the slack for the things that magic can't do anymore is so rich, so well designed, so well-written that the reader has to stop every so often and try to take it in.

Even if I didn't really like the book all that much, I'd still be recommending the book for the worldbuilding. It's a master class in how to do it, how to describe it, and how to reveal it to the reader.

A GRIPE
Just so, so, so many extended passages in italics. I won't try to make a case against them, Benjamin Dryer does a better job than I possibly could. I just find them aggravating. It'd be so easy to indicate that something's a flashback without them and spare readers the annoyance.

SO, WHAT DID I THINK ABOUT THE LAST SMILE IN SUNDER CITY

Maybe nobody gets better. Maybe bad people just get worse. It’s not the bad things that make people bad, though. From what I’ve seen, we all work together in the face of adversity. Join up like brothers and work to overcome whatever big old evil wants to hold us down. The thing that kills us is the hope. Give a good man something to protect and you’ll turn him into a killer.

Fetch is a classic hard-boiled detective in a classically noir tale—the fact that it takes place in a Fantasy world (yet full of fairly modern technology) is just icing on a pretty tasty cake. The narrative voice is great, the writing leaps to life, and I can't say enough about the way the world—and the novel—were designed and executed.

This probably deserves more than the 4 Stars I'm giving it, but I just didn't connect with the story, with Fetch, with everything else going on as much as I wanted to. This regrettably ends up in the category of books that I admire more than I enjoy. But my admiration of this is so high that it almost doesn't matter. This is a great Fantasy novel, and one unlike any you've read.

The sequel is out in a couple of weeks—I'm coming back to this world because now that Arnold doesn't have to spend so much time explaining how the world works (or, more properly, how it no longer works) that he'll be able to focus on telling a story or two, and I want to see what heights he's capable of when the rules have already been established.

Do I recommend this book? Oh yeah. You'll probably like it more than I did (I'm a little worried about hitting "publish" on this, as I know I'm one of the less enthusiastic readers of this). And even if you don't, you'll be just as impressed as I am with Arnold's imagination and skill. ( )

I hate when a book doesn’t live up to its potential. This had so much about it that was cool and/or different—the multi-species world, the disappearance of magic, the MC’s involvement in said disappearance, the commentary on racism, the Pratchett comparison in a blurb—but nothing was ever quite cool enough to hook me and I felt like the points Arnold was making never hit the marks they could have. Close for sure, but not a bullseye.

Props to Arnold for the world-building, though! He’s taken a typical fantasy world with multiple races and cultures, built depth into it so traditions and places have explanations, worked things so the world felt reasonably modern with peacekeeping forces and hospitals and such, and then twisted everything by suddenly, violently removing magic from the equation. It was interesting to see how everyone picks up the pieces and rebuilds society (or not) when they’re used to magic, flight, immortality, shapeshifting, etc., and that is a really neat thing to pin the urban fantasy/noir aesthetics on. That said, I definitely hit a point where the introduction of a new race or element felt like Arnold was just packing them in, and I’m not engaged enough with high fantasy to really appreciate much of the trope-upending he was doing. I’m more of a low fantasy gal.

Fetch, his detective, makes complete sense within the setting, especially as his past comes out over the course of the book. He’s also a good narrator in terms of quips and leading the readers through the story, and he’s complex enough to be fun to follow and puzzle out, especially his brand of cynical optimism. Some of the twists in his backstory I kind of saw coming and some I didn’t. Unfortunately, a lot of the time he felt to me like too much of a noir detective, with nothing to distinguish himself beyond the world he lived in, and every time I meet a detective like that, I bounce off them.

The story itself felt fairly standard—a missing persons case, a detective atoning for past sins, seedy underworld, red herrings—but it’s really a vehicle for exploring the before and after of the fantasy world. While I might not have been super into the before (again, not a high fantasy person), I did like seeing the contrast and piecing together what went wrong. I also liked that Arnold uses that contrast, and the plot, to comment on racism and bigotry and the effects of things like isolationism and supremacists on social cohesion. However, that commentary is where my bullseye comment earlier comes back, and the Pratchett comparison, because Arnold doesn’t quite reach the same level of pointedness that Pratchett would’ve with the same material. I wished he’d been pushed a little more by his editor because that part could have sung.

In the end, this was fine. There’s a lot of neat stuff here, from the world to the plot to the themes, and I don’t regret reading it, but between my hopes not being met and a few elements that didn’t really appeal to me, I never really connected to it. It’s a fun enough book and if it sounds like your thing, go for it! But I won’t be continuing with the series or probably thinking much about it.

To bear in mind: The protagonist is a true noir detective. This means he gets drunk and/or high frequently, commits acts of violence, and comments on female attractiveness. This book also takes racism as a theme but wobbles in the execution thereof.

4/10 ( )