This is essentially an urban fantasy but, unlike most urban fantasy, features a male protagonist with a female love interest with whom the protagonist has a pre-existing, ongoing relationship. There is not a love triangle in sight. It's not terrible, but it's nothing to write home about, so to speak. According to the descriptive standards of Goodreads star ratings, "it was okay".

There was a bit too much exposition at times. There was a bit too much expository dialog at times. Some descriptions went on for just a little too long, and in at least one case still resulted in me not having a great mental picture of the scene. The magic "system", such as it was, basically consisted of a bunch of occasions where a character happened to have some minor deus ex machina on hand to address the need of the moment.

The ideas behind the plot were interesting. The execution felt a bit lacking. I think there's a period of a few dozen pages where the protagonist's primary activity involved running around between two or three different general locations while events happened, and in the end it wasn't really the protagonist who made things happen; at times, he was just an ineffectual witness. The protagonist is supposed to be among the most knowledgeable users of magic in the world, with easily the most extensive known collection of magical texts in the world, and others refer to him as some kind of magical big deal at times, but in the context of the story he seems like the single least effective user of magic, and he rarely seems to know as much about magic as others. His big moment researching some key element of the events building toward the climax produces a tantalizing bit of a sense of scope and danger, but then ends up being irrelevant to the actual plot and just gets quietly dropped. HIlariously, the most use that information could have been was in the moment that inspired him to look it up, so that ship had already sailed.

It was pretty clear he was the protagonist, nonetheless, though.

Before this, I've read a trilogy by this author, and another book that was part of a multi-author series, both set in the Vampire: The Dark Ages setting, and his writing was quite good in all of that. This book, by contrast, was a bit of a disappointment. As I said, though, it wasn't really bad. It just wasn't great, either. ( )