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A review by rui_leite
The Detective by Jonathan L. Howard
4.0
After reading some of the other reviews here on Goodreads I must say I went into “Johannes Cabal, The Detective” slightly afraid. The thing was I liked the previous book so much I was a bit worried that all that talk about “change of genre” and “difference of feel” actually meant “it went went downhill and we are just too attached to the first book to actually say that.” I needed not worry, though. The truth is that even if this work is not as brilliant as the first, yes, it still sports moments of brilliant writing, a great morally ambiguous protagonist and a fairly clever use of tropes that make it very worthy.
The thing is, this is not exactly a “sequel”, in the sense that it answers questions left open by the previous book but, instead, feels more like a “new episode” in Cabal’s life, and I can see how that might put some people off. Still it does expand on what we know of the character and gives him further background ( yes, it even confirms who the “mystery woman” at the end of the previous book is), but that is not the main point of this story.
We begin in media res, with Cabal in a jail awaiting execution, and proceed to see how he resurrects a dead “emperor” and ends up running off, hiding in a state of the art flying vessel, disguised as a boring civic servant (someone he secretly comes to loathe). Then fowl murder happens and Cabal’s mind is just too inquisitive to let it go.
In many ways this felt like an experiment to see in what other genres Cabal could run amok; if the previous book was a bit like “Lovecraft meets Something Wicked This Way Comes” this one is “Agatha Christie meets “steam-punk”" (or, better yet, "diesel-punk", as it’s suggested by TV Tropes… in fact I’d actually say “ether-punk”, just to nitpick and make up my very own word, but if I did so I’m willing to bet there would be no end to this so I better not go down that road.)
As I feared, without Horst, the emotional tension drops a few notches, but there are enough moments between Leone (yes, her) and Cabal to avoid the whole thing dropping into emotionless papier-mâché. In fact she turns out to be a bit more interesting here than I expected. I actually enjoyed her presence even though I thought at first it might be a bit forced to have her around. In the end she rather worked well as new partner for Cabal (think Watson to Cabal’s Holmes), taking some of Horst's duties as a character along the way.
Still, the fact is, there were a few things that didn’t seem to work as well as in the first instalment… with the change of genre Cabal seems a bit out of place (even though it could be argued that is the whole point of the genre shift) and, above all, the switch from a story with a somewhat episodic nature in the first book, to a fairly self contained plot, does hurt this a bit. I didn’t really notice until I missed it how much part of the fun in the previous novel came from seeing Cabal cope with each new problem that was presented to him along the track. In here there is just one large question begging for an answer: “Who is responsible for the murders aboard the flying vessel, and why?” (DUM-DUM-DUM).
Still this was a nice chance to see Cabal’s mind at work confronted with a logical puzzle, and I have to say I found the solution rather well played and smart.
Also the large amount of wordbuild (we finally learn, exactly, what kind of world is inhabited by Cabal, rather than the slightly ambiguous view we get in “The Necromancer”) might explain why there is a slight drop in character development here. But, yeah, as a murder mystery with political satire undertones the book works rather well. In fact it only fails when compared with the first novel and the short story at the end, which is, arguably, a bit closer to “The Necromancer” both in tone and subject matter, might show exactly what was missing in “The Detective”. Still, let’s face it, the first novel was so good that you could write something a peg or two lower down the awesomeness scale and still have a good book at hand. I do think that is what happened here. It’s not the mind-blowing explosion “The Necromancer” was but it still is a very good book. And yes, Cabal does manage to carry the whole thing on his back, making a fairly ordinary murder-mystery have quite a few surprising moments and rise above the norm.
The thing is, this is not exactly a “sequel”, in the sense that it answers questions left open by the previous book but, instead, feels more like a “new episode” in Cabal’s life, and I can see how that might put some people off. Still it does expand on what we know of the character and gives him further background ( yes, it even confirms who the “mystery woman” at the end of the previous book is), but that is not the main point of this story.
We begin in media res, with Cabal in a jail awaiting execution, and proceed to see how he resurrects a dead “emperor” and ends up running off, hiding in a state of the art flying vessel, disguised as a boring civic servant (someone he secretly comes to loathe). Then fowl murder happens and Cabal’s mind is just too inquisitive to let it go.
In many ways this felt like an experiment to see in what other genres Cabal could run amok; if the previous book was a bit like “Lovecraft meets Something Wicked This Way Comes” this one is “Agatha Christie meets “steam-punk”" (or, better yet, "diesel-punk", as it’s suggested by TV Tropes… in fact I’d actually say “ether-punk”, just to nitpick and make up my very own word, but if I did so I’m willing to bet there would be no end to this so I better not go down that road.)
As I feared, without Horst, the emotional tension drops a few notches, but there are enough moments between Leone (yes, her) and Cabal to avoid the whole thing dropping into emotionless papier-mâché. In fact she turns out to be a bit more interesting here than I expected. I actually enjoyed her presence even though I thought at first it might be a bit forced to have her around. In the end she rather worked well as new partner for Cabal (think Watson to Cabal’s Holmes), taking some of Horst's duties as a character along the way.
Still, the fact is, there were a few things that didn’t seem to work as well as in the first instalment… with the change of genre Cabal seems a bit out of place (even though it could be argued that is the whole point of the genre shift) and, above all, the switch from a story with a somewhat episodic nature in the first book, to a fairly self contained plot, does hurt this a bit. I didn’t really notice until I missed it how much part of the fun in the previous novel came from seeing Cabal cope with each new problem that was presented to him along the track. In here there is just one large question begging for an answer: “Who is responsible for the murders aboard the flying vessel, and why?” (DUM-DUM-DUM).
Still this was a nice chance to see Cabal’s mind at work confronted with a logical puzzle, and I have to say I found the solution rather well played and smart.
Also the large amount of wordbuild (we finally learn, exactly, what kind of world is inhabited by Cabal, rather than the slightly ambiguous view we get in “The Necromancer”) might explain why there is a slight drop in character development here. But, yeah, as a murder mystery with political satire undertones the book works rather well. In fact it only fails when compared with the first novel and the short story at the end, which is, arguably, a bit closer to “The Necromancer” both in tone and subject matter, might show exactly what was missing in “The Detective”. Still, let’s face it, the first novel was so good that you could write something a peg or two lower down the awesomeness scale and still have a good book at hand. I do think that is what happened here. It’s not the mind-blowing explosion “The Necromancer” was but it still is a very good book. And yes, Cabal does manage to carry the whole thing on his back, making a fairly ordinary murder-mystery have quite a few surprising moments and rise above the norm.