sf/fantasy. Detective searches for unicorn lost by leprechan. Good read.

A failing detective is hired on New Year's Eve to find a missing unicorn. His employer is a desperate leprechaun who will be killed in the morning if he does not find the stolen animal. He guides Mallory into an alternate world of the Fae and by morning they have visited several Manhattan landmarks in the alternate world.

library book read 9/4/2023 ( )

down on his luck detective hired by an elf to stalk a unicorn through an alternate Manhattan

For such a short book, I had an unbelievable long time with it. This is probably not a book for me.

This is one of those books in which the very complex and complicated world created by the author absolutely obscures the story. The actual story goes to the background. As a substitute Mallory wanders through this alternate Manhattan meeting more and more strange characters who do not contribute much to the general plot. This is not my favorite form of story. I definitely prefer it when the interesting plotline wins out over the overdeveloped imaginary world.

My other problem is humor, but it is probably just my problem. I don't like funny books because I rarely find them funny indeed and much more often they just irritate me. And I hate humor in the Prachett style the most. This book, unfortunately, sometimes came close to such a humor. I don't know what it is, because I generally like absurd humor, but Prachett's efforts have always seemed senseless and annoying to me. And here it annoyed me sometimes as well. Jokes sometimes seemed to me forced and did not lead to anything other than simple comic relieve. They lack the finesse and surprise element, they are more like archetypal banana peel. I read other books of this author and I didn't have such a problem with it, but here at times it really irritated me.

Another thought that came to me during this reading is that maybe I'm just too old for this book. I think if I was thirteen I would like it much more. After all, it's an uncomplicated funny story with a jumble of unconventional characters. Simple, unsophisticated entertainment just right for a teenager.

This is not a bad book, but it didn't really urge me to continue the series. I think I will miss Mallory's further adventures. At least until I forget how challenging it was for me to get through this book. ( )

It promises to be a hardboiled detective novel in a fantasy world (like Raymond Chandler meets Legend), but it’s more like a portal fantasy. Like Alice in Wonderland and The Phantom Tollbooth, most of the main character’s time is taken up with little sidequests, like the two people playing a game of chess that takes forever, or the bar with old-timey witches. It’s like a character just moves from station to station, interviewing these oddballs and characters of humor when he should be getting on with the main goal. Because unlike Alice and Phantom, this isn’t a quest, this is a mystery. So it has a bad case of the “get-on-with-its”.

This book doesn’t deliver on it’s promise because it’s not a detective story. There are no clues, no suspects, no witnesses. Garfield’s Babes and Bullets was more of a detective story than this. So no, I won’t be reading any more in the series. It’s too farcical to be taken seriously. ( )