Customer Reviews

New Tricks (A Dog Days Novel)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was not disappointed. I picked up the first book on a whim. I was moving to a non English speaking country and wanted to take some books. It moves right along and does keep you wondering. I kept thinking I had it figured out, so much so I would tell my husband. That's what I do so when I am right at the end he knows I was. But, I was wrong a few times if close!

This book , "New Tricks",second in the series,
was really a good urban mystery book. The first book is called, "Dog Days".
The characters Mason,and his Ifrit,(a dog "familiar" of sorts),Lou,
kept me in my seat till the last page.
I call this book an urban fantasy,
for it takes place in the city streets of San Francisco.
Mason, a Jazz musician, is also a man with special magical powers who gets sucked up in helping his friends get in and out of magical trouble.
There is more out there in the city, than one would think.
Make no mistake, this book is not a cozy.
This book has some grit to it.
The characters are flawed ,and not everything works out perfectly.
I jumped into reading this mystery with my eyes open
and wasn't let down with its plot or its characters.
Which covers a multitude of creatures and, just plain weird people.
This book was well written, as is his third book in this series, "Unleashed".
I hope to read more of John Levitt's books in the future.

"New Tricks" has a slow, introspective pace to it that some will love (it has a nice noir-ish feel), but won't be to everyone's taste. The plot is solid and enjoyable. While I was able to guess at the culprit, there were sufficient red herrings and questions remaining that I was never entirely sure until the end. The world is wonderful---it has a smoky urban fantasy feel, with Mason's beloved jazz curling in-between the pages (I probably would have gotten even more out of the book if I knew much about music, but that lack of knowledge didn't interfere with my enjoyment). The characters---particularly the side characters surrounding Mason---have plenty of life to them.

Mason himself is an intriguing hero. His reactions to things were very much not stereotypical, particularly not young-single-male stereotypical, and that made him a fantastic lead character.

Unfortunately, my one real complaint is that the villain didn't fare so well at the end. Which is odd, because there were plenty of indications of depth before that. Somehow at the end most of those dimensions dropped away and we ended up in cheesy villain land. This doesn't stop me from recommending this book, however, as the majority of it is quite good!

I liked this follow-up to Dog Days but I have to say that I caught the clue that told me who the "perp" was and it spoiled the end of the book for me. I kept muttering at Mason to stop being an idiot and use his head which made much of what happened at the end dangerously stupid because it was his own doing. I considered 3 stars but gave it 4 because it was otherwise fine and should be enjoyed by fans of this genre.

New Tricks is just as good as Dog Days, the first in Levitt's series. Mason's character is a bit more developed and you get to know him better. The plot is another winner, and so are the characters. I particularly enjoy Levitt's conversational first person writing style. So many authors are caught in the mode of "old school" writing but Levitt proves that this more casual approach makes the story intimate and realistic. I look forward to the next in the series.

This time around someone is destroying the minds of practitioners. Victor and Eli call Mason and others in to help in the investigation. This time around Levitt explores the origins and nature of the Ifrits as a side story to the mystery. He also brings to light the feelings between practitioners with Ifrits and those without.

Mason himself is a likeable enough character. He is very laid back and not really interested in his magical talent. He'd much rather be playing music than chasing down villains.

I had the villain pegged the minute the character was introduced, but Levitt kept me intrigued to find out the why until the end. Unfortunately, he took the easy way out with the villain at the end.

All in all it's an enjoyable read. I did find some glaring typos that threw me out of the story, but they were less than some authors' books. I will most likely be continuing with the series.

While I really liked `Dog Days', I liked `New Tricks' even more.

`New Tricks' once again is combination of an Urban Fantasy and a Murder Mystery. Why were practitioners drained of the minds and left for dead?

Positive points:

1. It was nice to read that Mason (main character) is taking more of an interest in both of his talents, magic and music. As a free lance musician he took gigs with groups that you would never imagine him joining, even for one night but it was nice to see he was working, even an a practitioner needs to eat and pay the rent.
2. There were some pleasant surprises when it came to the otherworld creatures.
3. The one reoccurring mystery from the first book is the origin of `ifrits', the more they investigate and theorized the more interesting this thread is becoming.
4. Descriptive without bogging you down with unnecessary details. I like it when I can see in my mind's eye the scene taking place.

Negative points:

1. Some of the Mystery elements could have been a little bit stronger. I wanted to rapped Mason across the back of the head and tell the boy, "Wake up and take a closer look at the people who surrounding you." If I say more I'm going to spoil the story for you.
2. For those who read the first book: I would have liked a little bit more about Victor and Eli, maybe there will be more of them in the next book.
3. I have to wait for the third book in the series.

"New Tricks" is the second installment in this well-written urban fantasy series set in San Francisco. It follows "Dog Days", and precedes "Unleashed" and "Play Dead", the other published titles in the series that I've also read at the time of this review.

Mason, our mage protagonist who used to work as an enforcer with mentor Eli and wealthy martial arts expert Victor in San Francisco's Magical Bureau of Investigation (MBI) branch, is still smarting from the events that last occurred in "Dog Days". Campbell, a healer who once made his Ifrit Louie -- a magical creature that looks like a miniature Doberman -- whole again after a life-threatening injury, and whom Mason was falling in love with, had conveyed some bad news to him; and bad things had befallen some people Mason cared about. But all these have passed, and there's nothing else that Mason can do except to move on with his life.

This installment opens with Mason, Victor, and Eli discovering a hideous crime that seems to share a pattern with crimes first reported in Portland, Oregon. Victor and Eli ask Rolando, a former colleague and now their Portland contact, for help. Rolando and his sister Josephine, both practitioners, arrive to confirm for their friends, Mason, Victor, and Eli, that the crimes do share the same pattern: someone has been victimizing practitioners, attempting to possess them, leaving them not just dead but completely hollowed out, their bodies empty shells. A jade-like stone found in the San Francisco crime scene, and a dark practitioner named Byron, who according to Rolando has coincidentally just moved from Portland to San Francisco become the initial focus of the team's investigation.

The team shows the jade-like stone to a very learned but retired practitioner and asks if he can tell where the stone may have come from. The retired practitioner answers "No, but I'll bet Mason could find out". He explains: "Mason has an extraordinary talent for music. Music creates worlds ..." To Mason he says: "Channel your talent through the stone and you'll find where it came from." Mason carries out the suggestion to the accompaniment of a classical piece of music, and when this magical place starts materializing before him, he and his magical companion Louie, with whom he has a special bond, enter the place to investigate. Time runs out, however. When the classical piece of music reaches its climax, Mason finds himself gasping for air; the world around him shatters, and he is back at Victor's, "flopping around on the floor like some epileptic fish." When Mason recovers, he reports his findings, and the team puts together a working theory.

Meanwhile, the team finds out where Byron lives and Mason starts shadowing Byron. The death of another practitioner and other developments, however, lead Mason to train his suspicion to somebody else. After all, Byron is not the only one who has coincidentally moved from Portland to San Francisco recently. But just when Mason thinks he has the right suspect, most readers are probably shouting: "No no Mason! You're not questioning your assumptions objectively and thoroughly!"

That Mason could have made such a non-trivial mistake was somewhat out of character, and therefore, not entirely convincing or satisfying. My reading of Mason has me thinking that in order for Mason to do what he does best, which is to improvise magical solutions to problems as they arise, his strengths have to include the ability to think on his feet and consider all major possibilities while analyzing a situation. But I do understand how he could have been thrown off course by events that occurred earlier in the novel, so I'll let this slip by. :-)

Besides, there are more things in this installment that I like than dislike: I like the usual chemistry between Mason and his sidekick, Lou. They really do make a great team! I like that Campbell is still around, and that Mason's magical talent has grown a little bit, having learned from Campbell how to harness plants' energies, although I wish there had been even more growth in Mason's character and talent. I like the additional layering of music to the world building and other additional conjuring of possible connections between creativity and magic (for example, the observation that practitioners with Ifrits tend to have talent in music or other creative arts), which make this series a bit different from others, and I like how the events set off in this novel sets the next installment up for all kinds of possibilities!!

If you haven't read the first installment, "Dog Days", in this series, you can still read this novel (in fact, all titles in this series) as a stand-alone. The author does a really good job providing appropriate background information as needed.

I read "Dog Days" about two years ago, and liked it enough to buy this one shortly thereafter; it has languished on my shelf ever since, alas. But I finally got around to reading it, and I'm glad I did: this one was pretty good too, and fortunately I didn't need to remember the first one to follow this story. I remembered the characters, Victor and Eli and Campbell, along with Mason and Lou the Ifrit of course, and that was good enough. I still really enjoyed the musical parts and the magical parts, and I think Lou is a great character; the problem with this book was that it was far too predictable. It's about a practitioner (a magic-user) who is attacking other practitioners, apparently with the intention of possessing them; there is an obvious suspect, a black magician named Byron, but it is readily obvious that he didn't really do it. The reader is guided to suspect another character almost from the beginning, and in the process of being guided to that character, I picked up on the twist ending from about 100 pages in. Perhaps that was my own natural genius, but since I didn't know the guy was dead in The Sixth Sense until after my wife explained it to me, I don't think it was me. Looking over the other reviews, which almost all have the same complaint, I really think it wasn't me.

I did really like the world created in this book and the first one; these remind me very much of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, though these do pale a bit in comparison to those. I especially enjoyed the larger world hinted at in this one, especially through the magical outsiders like the Bridge Guy; they were much more interesting than the mystery. I also enjoyed the slow unraveling of the mysterious origin of Ifrits like Lou the "dog." And even though I knew it was coming, the final confrontation was excellent, I thought; it was disturbing, and there was certainly a little too much supervillain monologuing, but I enjoyed the bad guy's comeuppance. So I will look for the next one, and hope that it's a little more surprising.

If you liked Dog Days, you will not be disappointed. I like this author's style; it keeps me not just interested, but glued.