REVIEW: The Unnatural Inquirer by Simon R. Green

The Unnat­ural Inquirer (2008) by Simon R. Green is the 8^th entry in the Night­side series. This is my first foray into the Night­side. The Night­side is described as a place where mon­sters exist along­side humans in a pocket of Lon­don where the sun never shines. It’s a place where venal­ity is apart of the social order and sin can be had by all. The Night­side has existed for thou­sands of years and is ruled by no one in par­tic­u­lar. Urban leg­ends are not mere myths but sim­ple truths in the Nightside.

The nar­ra­tor of this series is John Tay­lor, a pri­vate detec­tive who inves­ti­gates the weird and unusual. He also has the gift of Sight which gives him the uncanny abil­ity to find peo­ple or things that don’t want to be found. The city of Night­side is peo­pled with sor­cer­ers, ghosts and demons and other crea­tures that fail descrip­tion. The locales for most of the city are either haunted or deserted. As bad as the Night­side might be, there are even worst parts of the city that most peo­ple sim­ply avoid. Nonethe­less, the Night­side is a pop­u­lar tourist des­ti­na­tion for sin and deprav­ity for those who know where to look for it.

In this entry, John is offered a case by a tabloid news­pa­per, The Unnat­ural Inquirer. He’s hird to go after an “after­life record­ing” that some­one inter­cepted on their TV and recorded on DVD. An actual record­ing of what hap­pens to you when you die. This explo­sive devel­op­ment has the tabloid ready to buy the exclu­sive rights but the owner of the DVD has sud­denly dis­ap­peared. It’s spec­u­lated that many Major Play­ers might be inter­ested in the DVD, for instance, those from Above and Below. John is part­nered with Bet­tie Divine, a jour­nal­ist who is half-demon and daugh­ter of a suc­cubus. Her job is to get the scoop on how John solves his cases. Together they go search­ing for the after­life record­ing and run into some nasty char­ac­ters along the way.

My thoughts are that vis­it­ing The Night­side was a some­what mem­o­rable and enter­tain­ing expe­ri­ence. This urban fan­tasy has inter­est­ing mon­sters and dark magic laced with sus­pense and plenty of wise crack­ing humor. I found myself laugh­ing out loud for sev­eral scenes. The nar­ra­tor is a cynic and his one-liners are very funny and serves to light­ens things up a bit. There are sev­eral inter­est­ing locales and estab­lish­ments in the Night­side that kept me turn­ing the pages quickly. For instance, the Museum of Unnat­ural His­tory where you can find odd and unusual arti­facts from the past, present and future.

Then there’s Nightside’s first amuse­ment park, Fun Faire, where John wraps up his first case when the story opens. Fun Faire is labeled as one of the “bad places” to visit in Night­side because it’s haunted. Years back, the rides were eat­ing the patrons and that’s never good for busi­ness. There are plenty of bars and dark alleys where rumors of urban leg­ends run ram­pant through­out the city. There are also sev­eral dif­fer­ent dimen­sions in this world that may explain the ori­gins for most of the pop­u­lous of Night­side. Peo­ple or exotic crea­tures who call Night­side “home” arrive there by acci­dent. That “acci­dent” is called a “times­lip” which is more or less explained as a door that opens from another time period–past, present or future– or another dimension–and then it closes. Often they can­not go back to their own time or some are just unwill­ing to go back.

Then there are the char­ac­ters of Night­side start­ing with John, our nar­ra­tor who is a PI from the old school who has the “trade­mark trench coat look” down pat. John is some­what of a urban leg­end him­self. He is most feared and has a rep­u­ta­tion of being cold and ruth­less and he does not dis­ap­point. The author doesn’t give very many details of John’s past in this entry espe­cially for those read­ers who have skipped the first seven er books and a brief recap wouldn’t have hurt. The author does drop in tid­bits of John’s pre­vi­ous cases that are very inter­est­ing and eye-brow raising. 

As for the law in Night­side, there’s Walker, who is most feared and uses the “Voice” that make peo­ple do his bid­ding invol­un­tar­ily. Also, there’s Betty Divine, John’s tem­po­rary part­ner, who is the daugh­ter of a lust demon who likes to change her clothes to suit her mood and is a pretty decent jour­nal­ist work­ing for a sleazy tabloid. Last but not least there’s the Col­lec­tor who col­lects unique arti­facts no mat­ter who it belongs to and he had some really neat stuff and then there’s The Removal man, another feared res­i­dent of the Night­side who has a pen­chant for mak­ing peo­ple, well, dis­ap­pear forever.

As good as The Unnat­ural Inquirer is, I did put it down and could for­get about it. There are cer­tain scenes that made me read quickly and oth­ers that made my read­ing slow down to a crawl. There’s some pol­i­tics on the power strug­gle over the real estate in Night­side that peaked my inter­est and there’s also the unusual rela­tion­ship between John and his bounty hunter girl­friend, Shot­gun Suzie that pro­vided a nice dis­trac­tion. Their past his­tory seems trou­bled. Suzie is bro­ken inside and John is loyal to her and is try­ing to help her heal. There’s also an inter­est­ing thread on reli­gion in rela­tion to the “after­life” record­ing but it adds noth­ing to the plot and doesn’t go too deep or get too preachy.

The Night­side was an inter­est­ing place to hang out at but it’ll have to be a one time visit for now. John will always have inter­est­ing cases and con­tinue to run into dan­ger­ous peo­ple but after read­ing this book, it didn’t leave me with a burn­ing need to read the first book in the series. It lacks some­thing that I can’t quite put my fin­ger on.  It is dark and vio­lent with a few moments of creepi­ness with scat­tered moments of lev­ity. Despite a few slow spots, the story is well paced with an end­ing that was some­what pre­dictable (I guessed cor­rectly on a few things). Good read, my grade B. I may revisit this series one day, who knows.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Simon R. Green, The Unnat­ural Inquirer, Urban Fan­tasy, Fan­tasy Reviews