Nightwise

May 11, 2015
Laytham Ballard, occult legend and self-described hillbilly, promises his dying friend Boj that he’ll kill a Serbian wizard and war criminal whose atrocities include murdering Boj’s wife. Ballard’s vengeance quest leads him to a massive conspiracy that encompasses Washington, D.C.; the U.S. financial system; and the 9/11 attacks. The urban mage antihero—cynical, haunted, morally suspect—is a too-familiar archetype by now, but Ballard is a darkly funny narrator with fascinating allies in the world’s mystical underbelly, known as “the Life”: magical hackers, a fetish model, an Australian shaman, a Japanese gun master, and a Templar trucker. Belcher tells a tense, tightly paced story and has a knack for stomach-turning depictions of violence and gore, though he also has a fondness for heavy expository dialogue and introducing key characters very late in the novel. There are occasional missteps in the well-intentioned depictions of gender and racial diversity, and some readers may be disturbed by Belcher’s treatment of 9/11. Agent: Lucienne Diver, Knight Agency.

Starred review from June 15, 2015
Belcher takes a break from occult Westerns (Shotgun Arcana, 2014, etc.) with this blood-soaked contemporary urban fantasy featuring a gray-hat protagonist cut from the mold of John Constantine and Sandman Slim. Laytham Ballard's granny intended him to be a Wisdom, a magic user who draws strength from his unity with nature and employs it to help and heal. But his great abilities led him to darker places, toward painful bargains with some unsavory entities and the use of his power for less noble purposes. Boj, an old friend and partner in crime, asks Ballard to fulfill his dying wish: to go after Dusan Slorzack, a magically gifted Serbian war criminal who murdered Boj's wife years ago. But Slorzack has vanished utterly, and the path to revenge is littered with corpses, old and new enemies, dangerous deities, and a previously unknown source of magic. The tough, ethically dubious magician/detective/grifter is a popular trope, but Belcher takes it to depths that readers may not have encountered before. Ballard is an incredibly ruthless, vicious operator who doesn't hesitate to use the few people who still care about him. Protagonists of this sort often destroy innocent bystanders by accident, but Ballard will deliberately use innocent bystanders as a shield or scapegoat to escape during a crisis. He feels guilty, even tormented, about such acts (or at least, that's what he tells us), but that doesn't stop him from committing them over and over again. As he explains, Ballard has literally bargained away pieces of his soul, with visceral consequences that most authors aren't brave enough to show. There's evidence that there may still be some good in him, but it certainly struggles to surface most of the time. Another fine effort from Belcher, ripped from a dark, dark place.

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July 1, 2015
The author of The Six-Gun Tarot (2013) and The Shotgun Arcana (2014) departs the trippy steampunk Wild West of Golgotha to begin a new contemporary urban-fantasy series introducing a wholly likable antihero, Laytham Ballard, a legendary necromancer who uses a combination of tantric traditions and Latin spell casting to tap into magical energy. Ballard is hunting a powerful and elusive murderer to avenge a friend (and stoke his ego as the Jim Morrison of wizards), and his journey takes him from the seedy underground of New York fetish clubs to the power centers of Washington, D.C. As with his previous novels, Belcher twists all manner of legend, occult beliefs, history, and myth into a sophisticated magical framework and offers his typically eccentric caste of characters: in this case, a mix of Illuminati, Templar truck drivers, Japanese demons, gun-saints, transgender fashion models, and more. The wisecracking and musically opinionated Ballard narrates this fast-paced and violent story with an offbeat humor and intensity that will have readers believing that magic and conspiracy exist all around them.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)