Dead Man in a Ditch: Back to Sunder City and Fetch Phillips

What is this about?

Fetch Phillips is back, hired to find out what happened to a dead husband, but along the way finds something that will affect Sunder City completely.

What else is this about?

Fetch’s world gets shaken up in this, and that was a welcome surprise. Fetch has been holding on to his past with both hands, and he needed to let go. Thankfully, that’s what happens.

Blurb

A former soldier turned PI solves crime in a world that’s lost its magic in this brilliant sequel to actor Luke Arnold’s debut The Last Smile in Sunder City

The name’s Fetch Phillips — what do you need?

Cover a Gnome with a crossbow while he does a dodgy deal? Sure.

Find out who killed Lance Niles, the big-shot businessman who just arrived in town? I’ll give it shot.

Help an old-lady Elf track down her husband’s murderer? That’s right up my alley.

What I don’t do, because it’s impossible, is search for a way to bring the goddamn magic back.

Rumors got out about what happened with the Professor, so now people keep asking me to fix the world.

But there’s no magic in this story. Just dead friends, twisted miracles, and a secret machine made to deliver a single shot of murder.

Welcome back to the streets of Sunder City, a darkly imagined world perfect for readers of Ben Aaronovitch and Jim Butcher.

I reviewed The Last Smile at Sunder City earlier this year, and found it to be an impressive start to a new urban fantasy series.

Dead Man in a Ditch continues with atmospheric writing as Fetch begins a new case — one in which murder seems to have occurred by magical means. Except, magic left Sunder City years ago, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to bring it back, though plenty are trying — so how did the murder happen? And Fetch seems to have earned himself a reputation as someone who is working to bring magic back — much to his consternation, because as far as he knows, it’s gone.

But that isn’t the only case Fetch is drawn into: there’s a husband who is dead, but Fetch won’t let him stay dead. There’s a search for a unicorn horn, and an actual unicorn that is nothing like you’ll expect.  As it was in The Last Smile in Sunder City, this  is a dark book, giving us more detail as to how different species have changed as a result of the loss of magic, and the desperation it drives them to. As a result, I felt this instalment was darker than the first book. The desperation is clearer, harder and the lengths to which it drives different characters in order to reclaim their pasts — unexpected, and darker as well.

However, Arnold skilfully draws these elements together, expanding the world of Sunder City and revealing the lengths the different species in power (so to speak) will go to reclaim some of what has been lost when the magic left.

When I first read this book, I assumed that this is the story of how Fetch will eventually bring magic back to the world, but now I am beginning to wonder if something else entirely is going on: maybe this is about a world that is remaking itself, without magic and Fetch cannot make things right. Or, perhaps, learning what magic actually means.

As you can see, this book left me with unexpected questions. 

While the bulk of this book and this series is about getting magic back to the city, it’s the desperation in these characters that sits with me — how lost they are without magic, and how and what they will do to feel or get some of that back. And, this is part of the worldbuilding in this book, I think. 

The thing with books like this though, as much as these big, complex themes drive main characters like Fetch, there’s a point where things need to get shaken up. Readers will understand the loss and grief that drives characters, and don’t need characters to be doing the same thing over, and over, and over again to remind them of the loss they’ve experienced — because things have to change.

And mercifully, that happens in this instalment — neither Sunder City nor Fetch will be the same again. And that leaves me excited for the next instalment.