The Last Smile in Sunder City by Luke Arnold: review

4/5 stars on Goodreads

The Last Smile in Sunder City by Luke Arnold

The Last Smile in Sunder City, The Fetch Phillips Archives 1, by Luke Arnold is marketed as Peter Grant meets Discworld, and whoever came up with that is doing the book a great disfavour. Yes, there’s a private detective in a world full of fantastical creatures, but that’s the only thing they have in common. I wouldn’t necessarily even call it urban fantasy, despite it mostly taking place in a large city. Post-apocalyptic fantasy or grimdark might fit the bill better. Perhaps for the fans of Daniel Polansky’s Low Town series, or Robert Jackson Bennet’s The Divine Cities trilogy.

The book is set in a unique fantasy world populated by every possible magical and fantastical creature the fantasy genre has ever come up with. Unfortunately for them, there has been a war with humans six years earlier that has wiped away all magic from the world, breaking it irrevocably and rendering the magical creatures and the very nature husks of what they used to be. The change is so recent that the people are only now starting to build their lives again, with some clinging to what they’ve lost and all blaming the humans. There is some technology, like phones and cars—though both have been adapted to operate without magic—but mostly it feels like a pre-technology world.

At the heart of the story is Fetch Phillips, a man for hire who is feeling permanently sorry for himself for his role in the loss of magic. At first I thought he was merely taking a general blame of a former soldier, but it turns out he actually is to blame. So he spends most of his time drunk. He’s hired to find a vampire who by all accounts is a model citizen and adapted to his new life without magic and with a certainty of an imminent death. The case takes Fetch all around the city and gets his arse kicked more often than he should’ve been able to recover from, and in the end turns out to be more than he imagined it would be. As he investigates, he takes a stock of his life so far and how he became the destroyer of magic.

I found the backstories infinitely more interesting than the investigation, which was done in a rather haphazard fashion. They were insightful and told a lot about Fetch and the human condition. They are also what make the book more a fantasy, or even epic fantasy, than urban fantasy. The rich world-building and the story of its fall are not what urban fantasy is usually about. The book also lacks the humour and the optimism of most urban fantasy that I’ve read. It’s cynical and dark, and to the very end rather hopeless. The book even argues for the danger of hope in making a beast of a man who would otherwise be content with his lot.

This was an excellent book, even if it was a somewhat heavy reading at times. The language is rich and interesting, and Fetch is a complex man who has a long way to redemption, if that is ever even possible for him. The side characters are all more or less bastards, with a couple of exceptions whom I hope will become series stables. I have the next book already lined up and I have high hopes for it.