Black City Dragon (2018)
Written by: Richard A. Knaak
Genre: Historical Urban Fantasy
Length: 368 pages (Trade Paperback)
Publisher: Pyr Science Fiction & Fantasy
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. My opinions are my own.
Why I Chose It: When this came into the Spec Chic offices and our Editor-in-Chic asked if anyone wanted it, I snapped it up. I am a huge fan of the 1920s as an era and I have been fascinated by the balance of art and entertainment culture with criminal culture for… well, most of my life. (I wrote my high school senior term paper on the Mafia decades ago. So, yeah, fascination.) This series seemed right up my alley!
The Premise:
An historical urban fantasy set in Prohibition-era Chicago, which combines action, mystery, and romance against a backdrop of gangland wars and the threat of supernatural horror.
For sixteen hundred years, Nick Medea has guarded the gate between our world and Feirie, preventing the Wyld–the darkest Feirie of all–from coming into Chicago to find human prey. But since he defeated Oberon, more and more Wyld have been slipping through. Nick and his Feirie companion, the shapeshifter, Fetch, have been busy hunting them down.
Nick keeps coming across the Dacian Draco, the sign of his ancient enemy Galerius, including a tattoo worn by a human thug. Unfortunately, every trail ends as if years old. Claryce, Nick’s reincarnated love, has narrowly escaped two attempts on her life, and when Nick sees her wearing a broach with the Draco on it, he knows they must look more deeply into her former lives.
With Wyld and gangsters wreaking havoc in Chicago, Nick and Claryce must confront the secrets of their pasts if they are to have any hope of finding out Galerius’s plans before it’s too late to stop them. Nick will need the help of all his friends, both human and Feirie, and the powers of the dragon within him, to keep Galerius from endangering the gate, Chicago, and all of humanity.
Note: there will be some spoilers in this post. Not so much of the plot of this book, but things about the characters and events of the series in general.
Before reading this book, which is the third in the series, I slam-read the first two. I wrote a very short review for Goodreads on the first, which you can find on my blog.
Things I liked
I really loved the twist on the St. George and the Dragon story. Early in the first book, readers learn that Nick is actually St. George and that the dragon had been the guardian of the Gate to Feirie and in killing the dragon, Nick (George) was forced to step into the dragon’s place. But the twist is that the dragon didn’t fully die. He resides inside Nick, giving Nick his abilities as needed (including transformation to his dragon form), in the hopes of someday taking over altogether and being alive and intact again. I found this little twist really engaging and the interplay between Nick and the dragon was very cool.
I also found the magical world that the author has built to be very good, in general. In folklore, the Fey are not typically like Tinkerbell or Cinderella’s fairy godmothers. They are generally self-absorbed, prone to cruelty, and quite willing to sacrifice another being — human or fey — for power or simple entertainment. I like that the author kept to this framing of the Fey and Feirie.
As for characters, I like Nick, though often find him a bit more angsty than I generally prefer. Claryce, Nick’s reincarnated love, is also a very good character — strong-willed and smart. I always like that in female characters especially. There is a side character that I’ve sort of fallen in love with too. That is Cortez, the Mexican police detective. He is probably my favorite of the support characters in this series. He is laid back, understands that there’s something strange or special about Nick but doesn’t push to discover what it is. We get to meet his wife, Maria, for the first time in this book and she is an excellent character as well.
Things that didn’t work for me
The very first thing I have an issue with — and it’s a big one — is that one of the rules of the world has changed in this book with no explanation. It makes me think that perhaps the author didn’t really note it in his world bible.
Fetch, who is a werewolf-like fey and companion of Nick’s, is stuck in his wolf-like form while on the human side of the Gate. He loses the ability to speak unless he’s around Nick. In book one, he could also speak around Oberon, the Big Bad in that book, and also around Kravayik, who is basically a high elf, from the Feirie Court, who has abandoned Feirie for the Church in the human world.
In this book though, Fetch suddenly can no longer speak when Kravayik is around. There is no explanation for the change, as mentioned, which makes me think that of the author, editor, and proofers, all of whom should have had a style sheet for the series, none had noted that Fetch could speak with Krayavik around. So this discrepancy was missed.
To me, it’s a big one and I found it disappointing, especially because there didn’t seem to be a reason, in the story, to make Fetch unable to communicate with Krayavik. The only reason it was even mentioned was in a subplot where Fetch and Krayavik were working together and Nick was musing, wondering how they’d communicated. Nothing really came of that arc or the change in the magic rules of the world, so it seems like a bad change. I read an Advanced Reading Copy though, so perhaps they’ll fix it in final edits? I hope so.
The other issue that I had is that in the end (and I had a similar issue with book 2 as well, but chalked it up to the cold meds I was on; now I’m not so sure), the plot that has been in motion and is being exposed isn’t clearly related. Even after completing the book, I have a pretty tentative grasp on exactly what happened to bring us to this point and, as a result, my grasp on the resolution of the big problem is also tentative.
I think this is in part due to there being a lot of references to things that happened outside the scope of this book — both in other books but also things that happened that pre-date this series. Keeping all of this information straight and understanding the significance of each piece can be difficult when we’re being told about it, rather than these things being actual parts of the story itself.
In Conclusion:
So with all that said, I still like these books an awful lot. I like the setting and I like the magical world the author has created. I enjoy the interplay among the characters and I definitely want to see what happens next. So even though some of the issues were actual, for-real issues for me as a reader, I will likely still read the fourth, whenever it is released. 🙂
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