Warden’s best friend and long-time comrade, Adolphus (who now owns a bar), is an important anchor for our protagonist, and also another surrogate father for Wren. Straight Razor Cure is filled with great characters: not only is Warden himself a perfect guide to the city, but those in his immediate orbit are also fascinating and fully-developed, interesting and distinctive. Polansky incorporates the world-building into the narrative very well, and there was never a moment when my “info-dump” alarm went off. It’s a fascinating place, written in a perfect way – the city and its inhabitants are never over-described, but nor are any of them ignored. Polansky shows us all strata of society in the city – from the wealthy, aristocratic playboys and dilettantes, to the street urchins and foreigners barely tolerated by the native population, Low Town is laid bare for us.

It is also quite endearing, with Wren rebelling against Warden’s lessons at every turn. When he takes a street kid, Wren, under his wing, he is reminded of his own youth in the city, and his tough-love approach to Wren is, at times, painful. His investigation has him butting heads with even less scrupulous denizens of Low Town, and psychotic members of Special Operations, as well as dredge up his past. There is no love lost between Warden and the guard, given his disgraceful termination and his chosen profession. As he digs deeper, though, events conspire to involve him in a more official capacity, much to his and his former colleagues’ chagrin. Instincts from his past as an agent of Special Operations resurface when he discovers the dead child, and so he gets sucked into an unofficial investigation. We only slowly learn more of who Warden is, who he was, and what he does in Low Town. Which makes this a tricky review to write… It’s gritty, engaging, cynically humorous, and everything just worked for me. Straight Razor Cure is one of my favourite reads this year.

This is a fantasy that perfectly incorporates a lot of crime thriller elements, making for a thoroughly engaging and rewarding read. The delay had nothing to do with perceived quality of the novel, I just never got around to it. With a mind as sharp as a blade and an old but powerful friend in the city, he's the only man with a hope of finding the killer. You’d struggle to find someone with a soul as dark and troubled as his.īut then a missing child, murdered and horribly mutilated, is discovered in an alley. Warden is an ex-soldier who has seen the worst men have to offer now a narcotics dealer with a rich, bloody past and a way of inviting danger. Here, people can disappear, and the lacklustre efforts of the guard ensure they are never found. The streets are filled with the screeching of fish hags, the cries of swindled merchants, the inviting murmurs of working girls.

The straight razor cure