This was another big surprise, all the bigger for its being a very pleasant surprise. This was one of those books I regretted requesting almost as soon as it was too late, partly because I had (as always) such a backlog, and partly, quite honestly, because it was not apparently traditionally published.

It didn't take long, though, to discover that (despite a scattering of typos and editorial errors which hopefully got picked up) the writing was <i>good</i>. (I sincerely hope the homonym problems and so on got fixed, because the story deserves better.) This is another example of how storytelling ought to be done. Colin Fisher has a dark cloud of bad luck hovering over his head, but the details are not divulged all at once – they're doled out effectively over the course of the book, as he decides to stop running from the cloud and take advantage of a dubious (but very lucrative) opportunity. The danger in the story feels very real; with a first-person narrator there's obviously a 99.7% chance that that character at least is going to survive a book, but there's a whole lot of pain between fine and dead, and it seems consistently probably that Colin is going to suffer. Terrible things happen - and it is very much in doubt whether or not Colin will be able to stop them. He's good at what he does, his own unique brand of magic – but he's outnumbered.

Not only terrible things happen – funny things do too, and, happily, they actually are funny. There's a good balance of humor and terror – similar, as others have pointed out, to Jim Butcher's Dresden Files – but it doesn't try to be a carbon copy of Butcher or anyone else. It's a well-realized world that Colin inhabits, beautifully detailed and absolutely believable, with a terrific cast of characters, human and otherwise. This is the beginning of a series – and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes.

The usual disclaimer: I received this book via Netgalley for review.