I really liked the first book, The Quick, and was looking forward to this one. But it was so cool it left me cold. Jimmy Miles is sent to look after this woman, and sees all sorts of suspicious activity and makes no connections at all. As a reader I could see what was happening a mile off, and resented that he couldn't and did nothing to stop it. Also, his pining for the mysterious Mary without really telling us what was going on... also not so engrossing. So I read it and kept putting it down and then forcing myself to pick it up again. Finally i got about 3/4 the way through, and just sighed and let it go. It still has the occassional glowing sentence, but this one didn't work for me. ( )

Jimmy Miles may be an L.A. private detective but he's far from your ordinary gumshoe. Jimmy's a member of a shadowy fraternity of "Sailors" who haunt the night seeking to make sense of a bizarre purgatory condition that mere mortals couldn't begin to fathom.

Jimmy's latest assignment is to track the despondent young Lucy, an unexplained favor for his close friend Angel. Lucy leads him to San Franciso, where Jimmy discovers she's a target of a rash of murders disguised as suicides. While trying to protect Lucy from afar, Jimmy runs across Mary, the lost love of his life, gradually realizing that their past and Lucy's present are converging in dark, disturbing ways.

"The Next" blends elements of L.A. noir with urban fantasy in a hip, stylish way. The author's prose is taut, his characters are vivid and his ability to capture San Franciso's otherworldly charm is superb.

Midway through, however, the plot begins to move sideways, the pacing of the mystery suffering as Jimmy shifts his focus toward Lucy and the events precipitating their breakup. Some of the scenes, beautiful and vivid as they are, also fall flat, as the author winds the characters up for confrontations that never materialize.

The oblique trajectory of this story may be displeasing to readers of traditional mysteries and noir. But for those who enjoy fantastic realism served up on a strange platter, it may hit the spot. ( )