Entertaining page turner. | Dead Men's Boots

Come on Felix | Dead Men's Boots | Mike Carey

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	• Dead Men's Boots Mike Carey Grand Central Publishing, 2010 - 544 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Castor's just a bit too thick in this one......

I'm enjoying the Felix Castor series immensely. But come on.....two of three elevators are out of order, a mysterious and unexpected package arrives.....and Castor isn't even a tiny bit suspicious? Please! Yeah, he's usually hung over and fuzzy-headed - but with everything that's happened to him, wouldn't he be just a little paranoid? I can't think off-hand of other examples of stretching believability in this particular novel, but there ARE a few more. I mean, even given the fact that the entire premise of the series is unbelievable. I like to be surprised by twists and turns, and this novel didn't really have ANY surprises. I don't think the author worked quite as hard on this one as on the others. But I like the series so much that I'll forgive him. And I'm waiting for more.

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Entertaining page turner.

This was a good "escapist" read where I lost myself in wondering how the story would wrap up the various threads that originally seemed entirely disconnected.

The main character, Felix "Fix" Castor, is an exorcist in an alternate London where the dead started to rise around the Millenium. Exorcists are the pest control of this world and have to deal with ghosts, zombies, loup garous and the very occasional demon.

The author, Mike Carey, takes a Raymond Chandler approach to the story by setting Fix up with several simultaneous cases. One involves a wife who wants to prove that her husband was possessed by a ghost when he killed a man as part of a homosexual tryst. The other involves assisting the bereaved wife of a fellow exorcist who committed suicide for no apparent reason. There is also another subplot - a continuing subplot from prior books - involving Fix's friend Raffi who Fix "welded" into apparently permanent union with a demon.

In handling his cases, Fix calls upon characters we've met in prior books - Julie, the demonic succubus, a paranoid zombie information broker, and an associate on the police force.

Mid-way through the book, the two main plots begin to come together as we are introduced to clues suggesting that the real murderer is a long-dead hitwoman for the Chicago mob. Carey does a good job of dropping clues throughout the book so that the final reveal makes sense - as much sense as a book about demons, exorcists and long-dead executed female serial killers can make.

The "ecology" of Carey's urban fantasy world seems to be becoming more complex. In the first book, it seemed that the issue was ghosts. In the second, ghosts inhabiting the bodies of animals - aka "loup garous" - were a problem. This time we have two demons who occupy different predatory niches.

Carey is playing coy with the reason for the "rising of the dead," but there are some suggestive indications that there might be some reason involving a "project" that provides an explanation.

I have a couple of nits to pick with the book. One nit is the trope where everyone is snarky to the main character. Obviously, we are supposed to know that Fix's buddies are true blue and loyal, but they express their friendship with threats and insults. This is probably a hang-over from the Chandler style. The other nit is Fix's insistence on his atheism. This seems to be another trope in urban fantasy. It seems like a strange attitude for a person who is, you know, interacting with friggin' demons! Apparently, souls exist and they seem to go to demonland where demons feast on them or somesuch. Again, this seems to be a convention for heroes in urban fantasy similar to the trope of our hero turning down any payment for his efforts.

All in all, I got my money's worth from the book. It kept my attention and let me forget the real world for a time.

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Come on Felix

Dead Mans Boots, another story set in modern London, with a quick trip to the US.
It is an interesting story with all the usual suspects from the previous works. Including the welcome return of one particular heavy thug.
The story revolves around a mysterious, frankly impenetrable, set of clues left by a suicidal, colleague / friend of Mr. Castor's. As always, the women are strong and feisty, the nights dark and getting darker and the clues obtuse.
This story seems to ramble more than the others, tube here, go over there, cab back, it is a bit of a mess and hard to keep track. Dead East end gangsters come and go along with a resurrected serial killer. The other bum note is the similarity to Harry Dresden, the Jim Butcher creation, a supernatural detective working in Chicago at the edges of reality. I just finished Turn Coat, so Harry was fresh in my mind. They both have supernatural allies that bail them out of imminent death, they both get beaten, hung over, psychically attacked, go without sleep etc. to the point where no normal man could function, somehow they struggle through the fog and pain to cast one last spell. They are both fine humanitarians, generous to lost causes, despite being depicted as broke all the time. Simply must be the lot of a modern psychic detective.
The story is interesting enough to make one want more, it is just a little untidy and seems that the author may have rushed the ending.
A reader looking for a different type of fantasy adventure will enjoy this book, as will Butcher fans. It is simply not the best example of his work.

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"Dead Men's Boots"

The intrepid exorcist, Felix Castor, returns under the skilled writing hands of Mike Carey, and this is his biggest adventure yet! After ignoring calls from a fellow exorcist, John Gittings, he finds his friend dead, an apparent suicide and feels guilty. He agrees to work with the wife in putting her husband to rest, along with dealing with a slimy lawyer who's trying to execute Gittings will to be cremated. At the same time Castor is brought onto a case about a man who's been brutally raped and murdered. As Castor begins putting the facts together it's starting to look like a dead female serial killer may somehow be behind it all. Joining up with his quasi-friend and succubus-turned-exorcist, Juliet, and importing some help from his zombie friend who always has answers, Nicky Heath; Castor will have to travel to Alabama to get some answers and put the case together. Dead Men's Boots continues in this third book in the excellent series that just gets better with each new release. If only the US could get the books published as fast as the UK, which already has the fourth book out, with the fifth due out in the fall.

Originally written on June 10th, 2009 ©Alex C. Telander.

Originally published in the Sacramento Book Review.

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Castor keeps finding interesting cases.

SYNOPSIS: Felix Castor can't help but have feelings of guilt when he finds that his friend John Gittings, also an exorcist, has committed suicide. Maybe if he had answered John's calls for help none of this would have happened. Gittings wife tells of how her husband changed over the weeks leading up to his death and wants Felix to find out why John's ghost hasn't moved on. The funeral is interrupted by an attorney claiming that Gittings made a new will which states his wish to be cremated, not buried as he has just been. In trying to track down what was going on in John's life, Felix ends up having to make a trip all the way to a small town in Alabama to unravel the tangled webs from the past which keep getting in his way.

OPINION: This story in the Felix Castor series was every bit as good to me as the first one I read, Vicious Circle (Felix Castor). This seems to have been reissued from 2007 so I have no idea about the order within the series. The characters which made up the central core of that novel are back and Felix has to deal with Dr Jenna-Jane Mulbridge fighting him and Pen Bruckner for legal guardianship or power of attorney for Rafael Ditko who is still demon possessed - partially because of something Felix did. That is one aspect of this story, although it did seem to recede into the background for long periods of time. I'm worried about Rafi so I wanted to hear a little more about him.

The primary story line is the tracking down of all the clues gathered by John Gittings concerning the current job he was working on and figuring out which ones were discovered by him when he was in his rational mind and which might be a product of progressing dementia. This is when we have Juliet, Susan, Nicky, and Moloch to name just a few involved in either helping or hindering the solving of this mystery.

RECOMMENDATION: This is gritty, dark, urban fantasy at it's best, in my opinion. But it is also absolutely alive with the kind of self effacing humor which makes this main character one of my favorites. In chapter fourteen Felix has a really violent encounter with a were-kin which involved Felix almost getting killed (again) and falling down a flight of stairs. Chapter fifteen begins with this sentence: "It may dent my image of macho, gung ho capability to say this, but the next morning I felt rough." After reading what had happened in the previous chapter that model of understatement made me laugh out loud. The book is full of instances where humor, be it aimed at his main character or someone else is inserted by Mike Carey and used to it's full benefit. If you like your hero to be honest about his weaknesses then Felix Castor is just the man for you. The whole Alabama/England connection became just a little convoluted and slightly difficult to keep straight, but ultimately a wonderful reading experience. I still haven't read any of the other books in the series, but I do have The Devil You Know (Felix Castor), and I simply must rectify that mistake. In the meantime, don't worry about whether or not you must read these books in order. Mike Carey makes sure that each book is a stand alone. Just jump on board and get ready to hang on tight to the hand strap!

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You might think that helping a friend's widow to stop a lawyer from stealing her husband's corpse would be the strangest thing on your To Do list. But life is rarely that simple for Felix Castor.

A brutal murder in King's Cross bears all the hallmarks of a long-dead American serial killer, and it takes more good sense than Castor possesses not to get involved. He's also fighting a legal battle over the body - if not the soul - of his possessed friend, Rafi, and can't shake the feeling that his three problems might be related.

With the help of the succubus Juliet and paranoid zombie data-fence Nicky Heath, Castor just might have a chance of fitting the pieces together before someone drops him down a lift shaft or rips his throat out.

Or not. . .

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