Sweet Silver Blues
I saw this available on one of the library systems and decide to pick it up. I’ve gone through about almost the whole series of Garret about 10 years ago, and since I’m re-reading the Black Company, decided to look at this again.
Sweet Silver Blues is the first book of the Garret Chronicles, in which a hard boiled detective Garret investigates and goes through adventures of a magical world. Its a relatively high magic world where vampires, fairies, halflings, dwarves, elves all exist in a fairly grungy world. Its about mid level fantasy and while sections of the series is dark, its fairly light hearted fare COMPARED to The Black Company.
With that said, the first book basically goes into introduction mode of the main characters, from the hard boiled Garret, to the Dead Man (Glen Cook’s version of Nero Wolfe, Garret, is of course Archie), but in this first book, that wasn’t as well established, so Garret only consults the Dead Man once or twice investigating this book’s case. In which case, its about an old comrade of Garret’s who has left a mysterious will to a woman previously unknown to any of the family members. Seeing as how its a considerable amount of money, the family commissions Garret to find the woman and to either get her to come get the money, or to give up her claim on it. Garret goes and enlists a few friends for this venture, and gets going.
This leads to some really far out adventures far away from the city to the outer lands where war between two countries are still happening, there’s a lot of political and personal intrigue, and the action scenes are fast and furious.
It all ties up nicely in the end and there was no indication that there was going to even become a series, but all in all, its not a bad introduction to the series. However, nothing much changed other than Garret becomes rich, so in terms of character development, at least this first book had not much of that going on. I’ve not decided if I’m going to go on with it, but maybe just for old time’s sake.
Mild neutral for me. You could do worst with some other book, and you could do better.