He Wasn't There Again Today

Canadian SFF monadnock Dorsey is operating in a new field so y'all sit up and hit the one-click. As one would expect from the author of Black Wine, sex and its coevals gender and sexuality get a workout here. Reading the third of what I devoutly hope will be an ongoing series first, I thought permaybehaps I'd be a bit lost, without the deeper background that makes series mysteries such good reads for me.

I forgot whose work I was reading.

Feeling lost and a little at sea is Author Dorsey's calling card. That said, I was never wondering where someone came from, or how anyone fits into the schema of the story being told. It probably helps that the way events unfold is as stochastic as real life is itself...it felt to me as though I was show more genuinely following our nameless detective around, learning things alongside them. In any truly immersive read I hope that I will be investing in the characters along with the main character, and that was indeed the case here. What might not work quite so well was the book's use of **COPIOUS** footnotes...over two hundred!...and huge numbers of acronyms. It took me some time to find a reading rhythm in this story, but I was so ready to trust the author, from past acquaintance in her SFF days, that I kept my hopes up. I felt rewarded. Again, as one would expect from Author Dorsey, there are little SFnal grace notes relatively unobtrusively scattered about.

As in all series reads, though, it's the characters that make the reader invest or decline to invest in the story at hand. Our nameless protagonist, sharp-eyed and -tongued, is a big draw for me. The other characters are literally kaleidoscopic, forming startling and unusual conjunctions with the narrator, each other, and the story unfolding. This is, to me, a net positive because as unusual as the juxtapositions can be, they're never gratuitous or exploitively deployed. I do sometimes feel as though some authors have, in their heads or on their editors' checklists, a set of identities that they feel the need to dot around to be "inclusive." This is absolutely never the way this read came across to me. In part that's because I've read the author's earlier work; in part it's down to the way the characters are included in the sleuth's life and thus this narrative.

I'd be remiss if I failed to mention the evident pro-environment, anti-capitalist thrust of the story. That won't work for some readers, because it's intrinsic to every element of the series' world-building. You know who you are, so you should seek elsewhere for your own ma'at needs to be met.

For me, it went down like a truly excellent, complex, single-malt whisky. I heartily recommend the read. show less

I received an advance copy of this book, thank you.

This was an interesting book in a lot of ways, but at the same time I had a hard time with it. In complete fairness to the author, this is the Third book in a series, and I have not read the first two. This book would have been much easier to get into had I. The author in fact. states on page 8 after referencing the first two books,"If you haven't read them, please do that, okay?, because there is a ton of backstory there. I still most inevitably review in these early pages because people's reading habits, unlike life, are not always sequential - but we all have limited patience with expository lumps, amirite?"

What I found interesting and unique about this book and this story was the show more style in which it was written.
The main character doesn't have a name, yet I had no problem picturing her and keeping track of her. All the other characters who interact with her do. The story is written in a very conversational way, the character pulls no punches, and clearly is thinking all the time, and this leads me to the second unique feature in the book. As the character is telling the story and going on with her life, thoughts pop into her head, and the author adds them by making footnotes. This is clever, and different, but I really didn't enjoy this style at all. There are footnotes on more than half of the pages.
So, if you're looking for a different kind of read, read the books in order and enjoy. show less