I'm bewildered! I thoroughly enjoyed the first four books in Vaughn's Kitty Norville series, and I completely trusted her to turn in another competent installment. What happened to this book?
Dead Man's Hand is too hastily paced. The character's observations are superficial when they're not cliched, and her interactions with other characters feel flat and obligatory, the dialogue empty of anything but basic generalities. The protagonist meets the master vampire of the city, and an illusionist who might be a real magician, and an animal act that might be employing lycanthropes. As intriguing as the ideas are, they don't go anywhere for the first half of the book. She meets the characters, they tell her they won't give her an interview, and after shaking hands, she leaves! There's no sense of menace or foreshadowing or even wonder; these are basic introductions. This novel reads like inept fan fiction.
More irritatingly, the book takes place in Las Vegas as Kitty performs her first live show the same weekend she intends to marry. The author unnecessarily reinvents Caesar's Palace and the Luxor with brand-x replacements (the Greek-themed "Mount Olympus" and a ziggurat pyramid-shapped "Hanging Gardens"); as though the readers or maybe the real casinos would be offended if she didn't use coy symbolism to reference them. It gives the book's Las Vegas setting a weirdly foggy, distancing effect, unlike, say, the more precise and recognizable rendering of Rachel Caine's Las Vegas in the Weather Warden Series. For all that Vaughn says she researched Las Vegas in her dedication, the setting doesn't feel authentically Vegas.
Moreover, the heroine is staying in the same hotel and casino she's performing in, and - gasp! - there's a gun show convention in the same building! And it's filled with supernatural bounty hunters who all want a werewolf hide! And they're all carrying big, bad, scary guns around!
Except, um, no, because virtually every Las Vegas casino on the Strip does not allow concealed carry by anybody but active duty law enforcement, and they certainly don't hold gun show conventions (Mandalay Bay hosts an antique weapons show, but that's different). So the hordes of packing maniacs coming in and out of the convention floor right outside the elevators to Kitty's room OMG! are every bit the fantasy that werewolves are. Between the shoddy research and bastardizing existing iconic casinos, the book is just...bad.
I don't know if this was a rushed first draft, or an artificially shortened final draft, or if the writer's heart is no longer in it, or what. Dead Man's Hand and the next book in the series are being released a month apart, so I'm trying to figure out if there was some kind of rush to conclude a publishing contract that explains this amateurish offering.
I gritted my teeth through this one, but I'll certainly be taking a few hours to vet the next in the bookstore before I go home with it.
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