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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9576895" data-attributes="member: 8461">I just finished James J. Butcher's 2022 novel, Dead Man's Hand, the first in his Unorthodox Chronicles series.I'll admit that I picked this one up on the strength of the author's father's name. I've read all of the books in the Dresden Files, and when I saw that Jim Butcher's son had also written an urban fantasy novel, I wondered if it might take place in the same universe, and that even if not it was likely to be in the same style as his old man. Either way, it seemed worth taking a chance on.For the record, this is decidedly not a part of the Dresden Files, which strikes me as a wise decision. While setting the action in another part of the same universe (this book's setting is Boston, as opposed to the Dresden Files taking place in Chicago) might have given it access to a built-in audience, that probably would have become a stone around the authors' necks quickly enough. Having to take each other's work into account with each new novel would, I suspect, quickly have become burdensome for both.And indeed, if anything the younger Butcher seems to have gone out of his way to differentiate his writing from his father's. Although he's also penned an urban fantasy story, numerous details are different, the most obvious being his use of third-person narration, rather than the Dresden Files' first-person. Likewise in numerous in-character differences, the biggest one being that the general public is aware that magic and monsters exist (and have a lot of prejudice against witches, which here is the gender-neutral term for magic-users).But what struck me as the most salient difference was the presentation of the protagonist. While Harry Dresden starts out as an underdog, that's only in terms of his professional standing among the governing body of wizards; in terms of power, skill, knowledge, and all-around competence, he's quite capable. Not so for this book's main character, Grimshaw Griswald Grimsby; while he's decidedly an outcast among witches due to his mediocre level of power and barely knowing any spells, he's also a major nebbish. Meek, cowardly, and all-around incompetent, he's Clark Kent ratcheted up to eleven and with no Superman alter ego.Which of course raises flags when one of the strongest witches in the region is found murdered, and her last dying act was to write "kill Grimsby" in her own blood (presumably she'd been watching The Da Vinci Code before getting offed).As it was, the author's highlighting of Grimsby's general terror and incompetence started to grate on me after a while. I get that this was laying the groundwork for a zero-to-hero kind of story, but it spends a long time at the "zero" stage before we see Grimsby start to step up...and even then, he doesn't so much become a heroic figure as one who barely manages to scrape by while avoiding dying mostly due to luck and a much-more-competent supporting cast member. It's like watching a 0-level character struggle to make it to 1st-level by the end of the book.Still, there's a lot of potential here. I think the plot pacing and story beats are a bit rough, but that's not unexpected; this is the younger Butcher's first book, after all. Hopefully he'll improve with time; as it is, the next two books in the series are already out, and this one was enjoyable enough that I think I'll give them a try.</blockquote>

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