Last year, I discovered a blend of noir and fantasy featuring a London exorcist named Felix Castor. Dead Men’s Boots is the third book to feature Fix, and it is a tense, intriguing read. Like a lot of mysteries, this one begins with two seemingly unrelated crimes. So unrelated in fact, that I had no clue how they were going to converge until Fix and I started putting the pieces together. The total mystery was so well thought out and original that I was very impressed by it. The only reason I knew the plots were going to come together in the end is because I know this genre. It’s like the rule in drama that says if you bring a gun on stage, it has to get fired before the last act. In mysteries, if a detective gets two seemingly unrelated cases, they will always turn out to be two parts of the same crime.
Unlike a lot of contemporary fantasies–most of which are romance novels with fangs thrown in–the Felix Castor series is a lot more like the mystery genre. Though there are ghosts and demons and loups garou, Fix is a lot like the quintessential gumshoe. He lives in a council tower flat (like the projects for the Americans out there). He doesn’t make a lot of money. He takes cases the regular police won’t touch. He’s not afraid to use force and fists if necessary. And he’s got a way with words that I love. His descriptions of people are often sardonically hilarious.
So, the plot. One of Castor’s fellow ghostbreakers commits suicide under unusual circumstances and leaves Castor with his notes. The widow pulls Castor into their business and the exorcist decides that he owes it to the dead man to finish his business for him. Later, Castor gets a referral from a woman who’s husband committed a violent murder. But it’s so out of character and bizarre that the wife thinks her husband was possessed. And as facts play out, it starts to look as though the wife was right. (Do you see why I thought these two mysteries would never converge?) Castor has to pull in all the favors he has with Nick Health, a zombie hacker, and Juliet Salazar, a retired succubus, in order to get to the bottom of what turns out to be a very grim business.
All in all, this was a great read and I really look forward to the next Felix Castor book. Dead Men’s Boots also makes me wish that more contemporary fantasy writers would pull in more characteristics of mysteries. In particular, I wish more of them would feature the sort of tough intellectual and ethical puzzles that Carey creates in this series. Brain candy is great every now and then, but I love brain broccoli, too.