I've heard good things about this book and the hype is real. It's fun, compulsively readable and entertaining. It blends paranormal fantasy and mystery and does it mostly well.
I have only one issue with it - the mystery plot is thin and I feel there's too much focus on world-building. Fortunately, memorable characters won me over.
Overall, well worth a read.

Dark, gritty and full of interesting characters - The Last Smile in Sunder City is an interesting take on the urban fantasy genre, with a lead character who oozes grey morality and a tortured past with a dry wit and self deprecating humour that makes him interesting and relatable.

This excels in its descriptions of Sunder City itself, the dirty underworld where our story takes place. It’s almost a character in itself, vividly brought to life into an imagined ‘post apocalyptic’ post magic world, where people suffer and slave away without the wonders that magic brought before it was taken away. It’s filled with tension, malice and hatred. Everyone looks after number one, while wallowing in the miserable consequences that a world without magic brings. I could almost imagine myself walking these brutal streets, scared for my life, and thought it was very well written.

Our main protagonist, Fetch, is incredibly interesting with a chequered past that is unveiled to the reader throughout the main story. Working as a private eye who hates his own human species, (although there’s not much work for him these days) he becomes embroiled in a missing persons case that quickly escalates into a mass of dead bodies and mysteries. I found him compelling (if a little cliche) but likeable, with the type of wit that I find fun in these types of novels. He feels well developed and fully fleshed out, with a backstory that explains his current position and opinions well. I will say that the pacing is a little all over the place - we get a swift section of action and plot development followed by a lot of world building and character development. Although it feels important to the overall plot and feel of the book, and meant I wasn’t confused at any point, it felt a little ‘info dumpy’ at times and perhaps shows that this is a debut.

That said, this is full of promise and imagination and a great addition to the genre.

Synopsis was really good so i wanted to read the whole thing. It was definitely an interesting read. I really enjoyed it. It was a debut but author created an amazing world. The character development was really good. The plot was really intriguing. Overall i really liked it and definitely continue the series.

The blurb for this was right in my wheelhouse. It is no surprise to anyone that has read my blog before that anything that is described as for fans of Ben Aaronovitch that I would jump at the chance to read. I have to agree this book was very much my type of book.

We follow our narrator Fetch Philips your stereotypical hard boiled, alcoholic PI with a large does of guilt on his shoulders. The narrative voice has such a great tone, you get a real noir sepia toned detective feel to it which really sets the scene. Fetch while human himself refuses to work with them instead dedicating to the long suffering magical folks. They are suffering greatly from a loss of magic. The mages cannot cast spells, the ware animals are stuck mid transformation and the elven population have started to age, but the population of Sunder city are trying to persevere. Fetch agrees to investigate the disappearance of elderly vampire which uncovers a lot more than he expected.

We get an amazing mixture the investigation, exploring the city after the loss of magic and Fetch’s flash backs of how life was before the loss and how his actions played into that loss. While info dumpy in the beginning it is done in such a light and inventive manor it doesn’t feel like you are being handed large amounts of information about the world. As the story progresses we still get insense levels of world-building but it is conveyed in many different ways that it keeps the story moving. The more we learn about the world the more we can piece together the mystery. The fact that Fetch is so integral to all of what we learn either through his flash backs or his investigations also makes it so interesting to read about. It’s such an fascinating world to get lost in.

This book also has one of the most fascinating magic systems, that beautifully explains the various abilities of all the magical beings. Again it has a very natural way of teaching us about the magic system through the various arms of the investigation of the missing vampire, clues leading us to background information that gives us those wee juicy chunks of world building, or clues that spark memories for Fetch that give us a little more insight into him and his relationship with the world he lives in.

Fetch is a fantastic character both unreliable and sincere, we get to learn a lot about him and how he sees the world from both his past and his present. I actually found his melancholy rather endearing. I feel it made him a more relatable character. I just really enjoyed Arnold’s writing and how he used Fetch’s thoughts, feelings, pain, guilt and flickers of hope to move us through the story. I do wish we got a little more about the various side characters. We do meet some of his friends from his past and we meet others through his investigation but it would have been nice to explore more, not only the differing races but also to get to know more about other individuals.

The actual investigation plot is a little predictable, I had my hypothesis fairly quickly and it was more confirmed rather than leaving me guessing but it is really the secondary plot. The real plot is what happened to the world, what happened to magic and it is the plot that keeps you guessing! I really enjoyed it. I was right there with Fetch trying to figure it all out, learning about each new aspect with glee. At its heart it is a redemption story one that I found myself cheering on, wanting Fetch to succeed, to find hope and to fix what he thought he had broken. I loved it.

I am really impressed that this is a debut, its well thought out and well written.There is a fantastic ease to Arnold’s narrative voice, there is just a friendly quality that makes it so easy to be absorbed into the story. The pages turn while you smile. It just has the perfect combination of magic, mystery, pensive angst, and humour, to make it an excellent read. It is such a unique setting and story and I will say it again I loved it. I loved Fetch and I can’t wait for more of his adventures.

I really wanted to like this book a lot more than I actually did. Great concept and world building, let down by a thin plot and bits of writing that felt like the author needed to get everything he had thought of on the page, rather than the best bits. Like other reviewers, I was also a bit alarmed by his writing about women. Overall I'm not sure that I'd be that enthusiastic about the next book in the series (I've no idea if there is a series planned, but it very much feels like the first book in a planned sequence - not because of a cliffhanger ending, just the world building and setting up..)

This was an interesting read. The best part of the book was the character development. I think the writer did a very good job at that. I felt attached to them and wondered about what's going to happen.
The plot was good and enjoyable. Overall, a really good read.

Thanks a lot to NG and the publisher for this copy.

Welcome to Sunder City, once a shining beacon of industry and home to dwarves, vampires, centaurs and all sorts of other fae creatures. But when the ‘Coda’ happened – when magic disappeared from the world – these species had to find new ways to survive without their defining features. Wyverns could no longer fly, sorcerers no longer had magic. And it’s all the fault of the pesky humans…

Fetch Phillips is a ‘Man for Hire’, a hard-bitten detective in the mould of all the classic hard-nosed dicks. His only quirk, perhaps, is that he refuses to work for humans – which is odd, because he is one.

We learn Fetch’s backstory through some long flashback scenes, building up towards an explanation of his lot. And in the present, he’s landed himself a case of a missing vampire – and a whole lot of trouble.

I must confess I’ve never heard of Luke Arnold, an actor apparently best known for Black Sails. I requested this book from Netgalley based purely on the description. It’s all a little bit Dresden Files, which is a terrible bar to ask a debut author to live up to, and while it doesn’t quite hit those highs it’s still a lot of fun.

The story almost conjures that world-weary voiceover of the private eye down on his luck. There isn’t a great deal of action, rather it’s a twisty, noir-ish tale with a lot of pretty impressive world building. I loved some of the explanations for where magical creatures came from – trolls as parts of the landscape that became saturated with magic to the point of sentience, for instance.

It was possible that setting the story post-loss of all magic would make it all seem grey – yes, the story is bleak, but actually the new coping for the species is new and far more interesting than oh look, another world full of beauteous elves. Fetch isn’t the cheeriest of souls, but his self-pity is also self-aware, and I found myself mostly liking him as a character, despite some of the teenage-y-angst of the long backstory sections. I still wanted to find out what had happened.

My one main complaint would be that this debut author is maybe trying a little too hard with the clever sentences, the ironic one-liners. It settles down quickly enough, and I have high hopes for a follow-up with Fetch and Sunder City.

Imagine a place peopled by a host of magical creatures, who one day had their magic ripped away from them. What is left isn’t pretty – and in the chaos and mayhem that ensued only six years earlier, Sunder City is busy trying to put itself together again. Well… parts of it are – other parts are full of the maimed and disfigured trying to struggle from one day to the next. Fletch Phillips owes quite a lot to the classical crime noir detective Phillip Marlow, with enough personal baggage to fill a luggage carousel at an international airport. His first-person point of view bounces off the page as we learn about the characters and the tattered remains of what Sunder City has become. As for that last smile in the title – I am not going to Spoil exactly who is wearing that smile and why – but it left a lump in my throat…

As for the crime aspect – Fetch is trying to discover the whereabouts of an elderly vampire professor, who teaches at a cross-species school. His search takes him into all sorts of places around the city, and he regularly finds himself in difficult, dangerous situations. I thought the plotline concerning the mystery around this missing professor worked well and was satisfactorily concluded – and I certainly didn’t see the denouement coming before Fetch did.

Any niggles? There are some pacing issues, especially in the second half of the book. There are several important flashbacks which are gamechangers and certainly need to be included – however, there is too much repetition of the ongoing situation. And as the book wore on, Fetch’s on-going misery became an issue, which was a shame. While the crime noir convention requires the protagonist to be suffering, he tends use to ironic humour to prevent his pain turning into self pity, which Fetch didn’t do, so the narrative drive stuttered and I became a bit impatient with him. I’m hoping it’s a beginner’s mistake and I’m rather disappointed in the editing, which certainly should have caught such a fundamental error. However, it isn’t a dealbreaker and the book has still garnered a very creditable score, as it’s still an entertaining read and I’ll definitely be getting hold of the next one in the series. Highly recommended for urban fantasy fans who appreciate something different. The ebook arc copy of The Last Smile in Sunder City was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest opinion of the book.
8/10

This was just OK for me, not the best book I have read but it was enough to keep me wanting more from the character and the story. There are some annoying parts, especially about women and how they are spoken about in places but again it was not enough to stop me reading this so something kept me intrigued.

I would recommend this to friends and certainly would read more from this author.

“Sometimes, the one who looks like a monster turns out to be a monster.”

🌟 Thanks for the publisher for providing me with an E-ARC of the book through Netgalley. That does not affect my review of the book.

🌟 I know some readers are excited for this one because the author is a good actor. I did not watch the TV series he plays in and I just read this because the synopsis sounded good to me and because the cover is gorgeous and has one of my favorite combos of colors.

🌟 The book mixes two things I love very much: Fantasy and investigation. I love those two genres and I read a lot of books that belong to either category but never both. This book combined the two categories and that’s why I was very excited about it. The word Noir kept showing around when I was researching the genre. I have not read “Noir” books before but it looks like this book fits the description.

“A cop was a cop was a cop. Like pieces of fruit; there’s good ones and bad ones but once you smash ’em into jam they’re all the same.”

🌟 The book follows Fetch Phillips, the human investigator trying to solve the case of a missing vampire. This is a super short summary of the book because Phillips have a past that he is not so proud of and we get to see that through flashbacks. There were many characters but most of them are not important, I was highlighting names and expecting to see them again but most of them appear only once, they provide an info and we move on, and that can be the case in an investigation story. Phillips is a morally grey character, he keeps reminding us of that too through telling which I thought was not necessary as we are shown it. I just expected a bit more from the characters.

🌟 The writing is simple but good, my kindle showed me that it takes less than 4 hours to finish the book and I did finish it in that time. That does not mean it fell short in beautiful quotes because there were plenty of those, I love this description for example:

“The raindrops attacked the street like it was personal and wind pushed the water up at every angle, filling gutters, boots and eyelids.”

🌟 The world-building is my favorite part, I liked to see how the world is right now and how was it before, a few mythologies were explained and given the author’s own touch and I live for this kind of stuff, we were introduced to the origin story of Vampires, Sirens, Trolls and Dragons!

🌟 Summary: This debut was a good one with simple writing, few characters and great world-building. The plot is interesting although there was less action than expected. I loved how the book ended as a standalone but with the option to expand the story and continue as a series which I think was smart.

The premise of The Last Smile in Sunder City is good:  A land where magical creatures (dwarves, goblins, gremlins, vampires, witches, you get the idea) are left redundant, in reduced circumstances: without their magic, the fundamental part of themselves.  A world where magic is gone, brutally ended by humans. How do Magum (magic folk) try to forge a life in this new reality and what would they do about the beings who were responsible for this tragedy?
I liked the sound of it as soon as I read the synopsis.

Fetch Phillips is a man for hire, rough around the edges with tantalizing snippets of his back story being disclosed every so often in flashback and whenever he meets up with a new character.  It is remarkable that he's employed given how disliked he is by everyone.  His latest case is finding a missing vampire school teacher.

Once I got to the setup, it kind of went downhill for me from there.  I don't know if it was the writing style, the volumes of information that was shared at every interaction with humans and non-humans or the languid plot but I was unable to become immersed or even interested in the story.

The Sticking Point
And believe me, I tried. I read at different times of the day, different lengths of time. Gave myself days off from reading the book, to give me an opportunity to miss it. My longest avoidance was nine days. But each of the innumerable times I picked this book up, I ended up unenthused within moments or fast asleep.

Sunder City, is an alluring place yet the world-building was clunky. Whenever Fetch went somewhere, spoke to someone, daydreamed or passed out, there were monotonous paragraphs of exposition about another interesting feature of Sunder City.  Emotions, feelings, and characterisations were stated rather than described. The first time that I recall was when Fetch said that the principal didn't like him.  At that time, there was no indication from an action or thought that Fetch was disliked. It came out of nowhere.

My Quirks
If I take a chance on a plot or a genre and don't find it to my taste, I'm happy to say that's my fault - I went out of my comfort zone, got pins and needles or a kick in the shins and would have to live with the residual effects.   In this case, the fantasy genre and synopsis sounded right up my street.  That's the galling thing -  that there were flashes of brilliance albeit,  few and far between.  It was disheartening to wish for and not obtain prolonged bursts of this brilliance.  For instance, the introduction and backstory to the Siren race was memorable and thought-provoking.  Most of the history of those who used to have magic was quite fascinating, it was just the execution that left me cold.

Why, just why?
Likewise with Fetch. Fetch is front and centre of this book and therefore it lives or dies by his portrayal. I didn't get the version of a charming, disreputable screw up with a heart of gold, looking for love and a place to belong. My Fetch droned at me, was exasperating, his actions made me groan in despair, shudder in disgust and literally raise my fist in the air, like a cartoon comedy character, whilst shaking my head in annoyance. 
It was incomprehensible, impossible that someone could be this oblivious, make these many mistakes and not learn a jot from it? How can you be present at most of the pivotal moments in Sunder City's recent history and not realise the relevance until someone punches you in the face or explains it to you in a more tactful manner? 

Actually, in all honesty, how was Fetch still alive given all that he had experienced?

Verdict
And that's me done. Exhausted by it all. If I say anymore, I'll go into an incoherent stream of thought with no end in sight. I did finish it but it was difficult,  I struggled.  It took practically a month from beginning to end, which if I do say so myself, is unusual. The only reason I finished reading it was because I hate abandoning a book. 

By the end,  I had no interest in finding out the who, what, why of the missing vampire.  When I got to that part I was indifferent, my only thought was 'oh, so all this angst, running hither and yon... FOR THIS!' Also known as setting the stage for book two in the series.

Lovely premise, shame about the delivery.

My thanks to NetGalley, Little Brown Book Group UK and Orbit for an advance copy of this book in exchange for a candid review.


2 Stars -  It Was Okay

The Last Smile in Sunder City. It took me a while to get to know the characters at first but once settled in I throughly enjoyed it. A bit different to my usual read but enjoyed nonetheless..

This was an interesting read. 6 years ago, magic ceased to work, leaving dragons, gnomes, vampires, elves and other creatures slowly dying and struggling in a human world. It is an intriguing premise, but I struggled to identify with the characters - the main character has no redeeming features, although he strangely seems to charm people (especially the female characters) without any real explanation. I did like seeing the viewpoints of creatures like werewolves and vampires who no longer had magical powers, and finding out the series of events that had set it all in motion. The city was well-described, and there were some fantastic ideas. There is probably a lot of mileage to be had with stories set in this world, but the tone was fairly dark and violent, which I did not enjoy. If another book is published in the series, I will probably read it.

A sincere thank you to the publisher, author and Netgalley for providing me an ebook copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review. I enjoyed this story very much and felt like I knew each character personally due to the description of them. I enjoyed the storyline. This is not my usual genre but in this instance I am extremely pleased and grateful for opening up my mind to something totally different. Thanks again.

Many thanks to the author, publisher and Netgalley for a free ARC of this ebook. Firstly I did quite enjoy it though have reservations. It's a long book, with some cracking characters who develop well as the story unfolds. There's some full-on action scenes and a whole lot of meandering world-building. The protagonist Fetch is someone that it is hard to like, he's a dirty, alcoholic with a history of wrong doing. Even when he does do the right thing, it's soon overwhelmed by his next catastrophic decision. This was one of those books that I didn't plough quickly through, excited to know the story, I read it in fits and starts.. I think this was because the really good bits were interspersed with long tedious descriptions and Fletches bad habits. The author has built an interesting world, and I'd be surprised if there weren't more books to come and I would probably want to read them

Sadly this wasn't for me. I couldn't connect with the lead character and although the storyline seemed interesting, it just wasnt for me.

The Last Smile in Sunder City by Luke Arnold is an impressive debut that blends the noir and fantasy genres to good effect. The book follows Fetch, a human who works as a " Man for Hire" . a personal investigator in a city filled with all kinds of magical creatures from vampires and werewolves to sirens and angels. His only rule is that he will not work for humans, so when the Headmaster of a local school hires him to investigate the disappearance of a teacher on staff, one who happens to be a vampire, Fetch sets off on the trail. What makes the world building in this book infinitely more interesting is that while magical creatures fill the world, magic itself has been destroyed, and as we find out over the course of the book, Fetch had no small part to play in that destruction. Since magical creatures need magic to thrive, its disappearance has had some tragic results, such as werewolves who live in a partially transformed state, sirens who have lost their voices and vampires without teeth. Arnold has done a wonderful job in making his world come to life on the page, as a reader you can almost smell the decay and fell the dejection of many of the characters and it is clear that he has spent a lot of time considering what a world suddenly deprived of its magic would be like. . Speaking of characters, time to say a few words about Fetch. I liked his back story a lot, and it really shed a light on his behaviour, so I appreciate how the author seeded it throughout the book. In his wisecracking PI persona he feels like he would be right at home in any noir crime thriller, he just happens to live in a magical world and I feel there is a lot of potential for a series based on the character.. I do wish he was not quite so self pitying though, it does make it a little harder to warm to him as a character, which is important if you want a reader to invest in a series of books. The pacing is definitely a little uneven, and while I enjoyed Fletch's back story it did get in the way of the plot at times, and there were a couple of side plots that while fun, could have been trimmed in the interests of making the story sharper, Overall I felt like the book had potential and with a bit more experience under his belt, Luke Arnold could have the makings of an interesting series.
I read and reviewed an ARC courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, all opinions are my own .

A strong flavour of 1940's detective fiction, Harry Dresden and Carnival Row - the hero of the story is a depressed social pariah who has killed magic and in the process destroyed the balance of the world he lives in as well as accidentally killing his dryad girlfriend. It's well written and draws you into the agonies and conflicts of Fetch Phillips as he tries to make good on his mistake and through the mystery he solves of the missing vampire. Ultimately you want this to be a story of redemption and the return of magic and there's enough in this first part to make you want to come back and read the next in the sequence.

I'm sorry to DNF this book but I couldn't connect with the story and the characters. The writing style was pretty bland and I wasn't interested or captivated enough to continue reading the story.

I should have loved this. The world Luke Arnold created here (post-magic, well-thought-out, imaginative) is absolutely brilliant. I adore stories that deal with the fall-out of an event that fundamentally alters the laws of the physical world (see N. K. Jemisin's books and Robert Jackson Bennett's The Divine Cities trilogy for excellent examples) and this book does this incredibly - on a world-building level. I got the impression that Arnold's imagination is endless and the way in which he thought out how this sudden disappearence of magic would influence different magical races worked really well for me. I also really like mysteries set in an urban fantasy kind of epic fantasy world. Sunder City is a brilliantly done fantasy city, with flavours of a darker Ankh-Morpork. But there were two big kinds of problems I had with this book - one that I think is a problem with the book itself and one which I have to admit has more to do with my own reading tastes.

First for the more "objective" criticism I had: I found the writing clumsy. This showed itself mostly in a pacing that was, frankly, abysmal. The story moved in fits and bursts to suddenly coming to an absolute standstill, with the backstory and the world-building integrated in heavy, heavy info-dumps. While it did not bother me as much as it could have if the word hadn't been as fascinating, it led to the book feeling much longer than it actually was. The writing is also clumsy on a sentence-by-sentence level and filled with odd descriptions that took me out of my reading flow (examples: "My boots sucked up mud like hungry dogs in a pit of peanut-butter...", "Thick smoke tunneled through my nose like an escaped prisoner..." or my personal favourite "The future of [...] looked darker than a blackbird's shadow at midnight").

But ultimately my main issue with this book came down to the main character: Fetch Philipps is everything that annoys me with male protagonists in noir type stories. He is a guilt-ridden, alcoholic, direction-less, and unpleasant private investigator who is not snarky or intelligent enough to be interesting. He is also weirdly indistinct as a main character - he reads super young in the flashbacks and middle aged in present time, he reacts more to what is going on than being a more active player, his motivations are deeply selfish until they suddenly aren't, and his narration never became a distinct voice for me (and additionally, I found it fairly male gaze-y). I admit that this has a lot more to do with my own reading tastes but he really did rub me the wrong way. He is also, and this is a petty issue, disgusting - there were a few scenes where he behaves in a weirdly disgusting way in order to intimidate (?) people (like when he downs the drink the bartender he is questioning spit in or when he drinks from an open bottle although other people informed him there were flies swimming in there).

Content warning: trauma, loss of a loved one, alcoholism, substance abuse