NEW TRICKS picks up about a year or so after the previous book (reading of which is not required), with the guitarist and magical practitioner Mason and his dog-shaped Ifrit familiar Louie enjoying a laid-back life in San Francisco. When a friend has her brain sucked out by nefarious magic, Mason and Lou are on the job, along with some other informal enforcers in the practitioner community, trying to find out who is doing what to whom and how.

It's very difficult to read NEW TRICKS and not be thinking about the Dresden Files series. There are way too many similarities to ignore, except that NEW TRICKS isn't as good. The world isn't a vibrantly realized, the characters aren't as engaging and the writing isn't as crisp. Perhaps the author deliberately tried to make the pace of the story less intense than a Dresden book, and if so, he went too far -- there's precious little tension, and the pacing is so laid back as to be laborious. And the author manages to fall in the trap that so many authors fall into when setting a book in a town they obviously love: they won't shut up about it. If I wanted a tour book about San Francisco, I'd get one. Crossing genre's is one thing, but fantasy/ mystery/ Fodor's guide doesn't work. The other trap: writing about music. Even worse, writing about playing guitar. A little flavor for the main character is one thing, but after the first five paragraphs describing how he plays at a gig and I start to go numb. Writing about music is difficult for even the best authors, and Levitt is, alas, not as good at writing about it as he appears to believe.

I'm going to be charitable and assume that the author of NEW TRICKS read the Dresden Files, and thought he could improve on the popular series. Perhaps the author thought that Chicago was not nearly interesting enough, so he decided to change the setting to San Francisco. And evidently the author felt that the Dresden Files didn't have enough dogs either, and he sought to rectify that dreadful lack. This is the charitable assumption. The not charitable assumption is to say that the author blatantly ripped off the Dresden Files, changed the setting to San Francisco, and threw in a dog sidekick for good measure. Alas, there isn't much new in this book -- and I think that may be the trick.