Lissibith's Reviews > Dragon Precinct

Way back in high school, the first tabletop RPG game I ever played had us playing as cops trying to solve a mystery in a fantasty setting. Maybe it stuck in my head, or maybe it was just playing on an interest that was already there, but ever since them, the combo of D&D and police procedural has worked its way into my gaming in a variety of ways.

And since that point I've been looking for books that scratched that particular itch. the night Watch series of Discworld books came closest, especially around Men at Arms and Feet of Clay, but it wasn't quite what I was looking for.

This book was closer. More flawed as a novel than the Night Watch books, but hitting the right notes for what I was looking for. We have a cast of different detectives, three simultaneous crimes running concurrently and a lot of walking and talking and good-cop, bad-cop interviews.

A famous adventuring party has come to town, allegedly to head out on an island cruise. But those plans are cut short when the leader is found dead in his room at a local inn. And while our lead detectives are working that case, the others are on their own missions -- one pair after a serial rapist, while the other pair looks into the case of counterfeit glamour items.

I wanted to like this book more -- and I did like it enough that I'll definitely be checking out the next volume. But there were so many problems that I thought could have been sanded away and made for a more fulfilling reading experience.

First of all, there are a metric ton of characters. It's astounding -- and frankly, it makes the book a little difficult to fully immerse in because it throws SO many names at you in a short amount of time that it becomes kind of a blur. There are six detectives, their boss, the leaders of the city, the ME, the adventuring party, the multiple people at the tavern, the beat cops, the informants, the witnesses ... Just so many names. It can not only distract because you forget who's who (and thus what their potential impact is when they enter a scene) but also because a lot of them get viewpoint chapters. I didn't mind swapping between the three pairs of detectives, but the POVs beyond that felt like they detracted.

So, that's the first of two big problems I had getting into this book. the second was that the ending just wasn't super compelling to me. (view spoiler)[After all the buildup of who might have done it, the ending just kind of ... arrives. You get an idea earlier in the story that the culprit probably is involved, but there's absolutely no way I, the reader, could have figured out how it was all happening. The method sort of just comes out of left field in the eleventh hour. and once the last answer arrives, the book just kind of stopped. I turned the page, thinking there had to be a twist somewhere, but nope. (hide spoiler)]

So, definitely not a home run, but I liked the world and the interactions of characters, not to mention the premise itself, that I do think I'll eventually check out volume 2.