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.
Former enforcer Mason would normally be concerned with
finding ghosts and vampires stalking the Castro section of
San Francisco. Fortunately, Halloween provides the perfect
explanation for the abundance of ghouls. But someone is
trying to possess his old flame, Sarah. Now, with the help
of his magical dog Louie, Mason must uncover the black
magician responsible.
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