Dragon Noir

Dragon Cycles, Book 1

By: Daniel Moylan

Narrated by: Bryan G. Lamb

In the city of New Amsterdam, the roaring '20s are in full swing. Victor Quinn, a warlock and heir apparent to a magical kingdom, is working as a gumshoe and doing his best to stay out of politics. Victor has one rule in life: "Don’t get attached," and so far he’s done a good job of it.

Everything, however, is about to change - including the very essence of his being. As he struggles to master his new life, an evil plot threatens to destroy his home. Facing a lifetime of change in a few short days, how will Victor save the world, when he doesn’t fully understand what he’s become?

©2018 Daniel J Lefebvre (P)2019 Daniel J Lefebvre

Fascinating premise!

About the narrator:
He did very well.

I'm no expert, but it seemed to me that he got the accents and inflections perfect for the period and location. And his voice for Vic was absolutely perfect for the attitudes and overall feel of the character.

Unlike a few other narrators I've heard recently, he is perfectly aware that he can't do a convincing female voice, so he just softened his tone and used a slightly higher pitch to differentiate genders.

Naturally, I would prefer more genuine sounding voices, but I appreciate that he didn't break out the laugh-worthy falsetto for them.

About the story:
If I keep reading books like this, I'm going to have to seriously reevaluate my opinions concerning first person and urban fantasy!

In fairness, it wasn't amazing. I'm not blown away. But it was impressive.

When it comes to first person, the character's voice is everything. That, more than anything else, kept me engaged and kept me listening. Vic is an interesting character whose reactions are both natural and over the top in a way that makes this a lot of fun to read.

As I've mentioned, I'm not an expert on the period. But based on what I know, the book was historically accurate in terms of what sorts of things are available, values, lifestyles, and word usage.

There are several characters that are well defined and fleshed out, while others are kept intentionally vague in ways that make them intriguing rather than annoying. By the end of the book, I feel like I know Vic in particular extremely well.

I have just a few complaints.
First, it's heaviest in the opening, but happens elsewhere as well, but there is a problem with info dump expositions that could have been addressed much more elegantly.

Second, it seemed like the author couldn't decide if his narrator was telling the story "in the moment" or if he was a reflective narrator, telling the story years later.

To be more specific, throughout most of the story there is a lot of immediacy (things described as happening "today" and the like), while at a few points we have passages such as, "at the time I thought..." and other similar phrases which suggest the narrator already knows the whole story, so it's a bit incongruent.

Which leads me to my third problem, which is there are a number of instances where we have our first person narrator commenting on the thoughts and feelings of other people, not as conjecture but as statements of fact. Clearly, there is no way he could know these things.

And finally, there is a problem with a false ending/false climax.

The protagonist has his major epiphany and goes through tremendous change at around the halfway point, and while he does go through further changes after that, none are as major after that, so one comes away feeling that the climax happened in the middle of the book, which takes away a lot of the power later events would otherwise have had.

I can't help thinking the book should have ended shortly after that climax and the later events should have been the opening of the next book, which would have left a lot more room to really develop those ideas and make them more epic.

All that said, however, this was a really good story that takes place in a fascinating world. I'm not certain in the majority of the fantastical elements are derived from mythology or if they're purely fictitious, but I live the way the author put it all together to create this world.

In spite of feeling that some aspects were rushed and could have benefited from having more time devoted to them, this was a really entertaining book and I'm looking forward to seeing where the story goes from here.

What a great listen.👍

I really found this book charming . I instantly liked the main character swagger. I look forward to more in this series.