A Pocket Full of Spells (Ash Stirling)

A Pocket Full of Spells
(The Braeden Wolf series, Book 1)
Ash Stirling
LazyDay Publishing
Fiction, Fantasy
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: In the gritty, corrupt world of the City, Braeden Wolf scrapes out a lean existence helping those who need help, slaying what needs slaying, and generally finding dangerous scrapes to squeeze through. He's no saint, but he's better than the vampires, demons, and cybernetically-enhanced warlock gangs that roam the streets, unhindered by corrupt cops and mostly ignored by the upper-class power brokers. Braeden finds himself up against a danger the likes of which even he hasn't seen before when he takes on the Bell Street Push, a dangerous gang grown too powerful for anyone's good. It's here that he first meets Isaiah. Wielding powerful spells yet strangely hesitant to use them, Isaiah both puzzles and unnerves Braeden. For one thing, he insists that the Bell Street Push owes its unholy power to "seraphim dust," when anyone knows that seraphim and angels are religious hogwash. For another, despite his calm demeanor, the man must be certifiably insane: why else would he insist on bringing nothing but swords to a gun fight?
A Kindle-exclusive title.

REVIEW: It sounded like it might be a decent urban fantasy, so when I saw it during a freebie window I downloaded it. Stirling establishes a suitably gritty world, melding cyberpunk with the supernatural, and if it wasn't an entirely original idea, at least it felt solid. Braeden is the typical antihero one might expect to find in such a city, a cigar-smoking, booze-guzzling lone soldier of fortune whose cynical nature can't entirely mask his deeper, ultimately altruistic motivations. Overall, though, I found the story too fragmentary, reading like a few chapters pulled from a larger mytharc; it only resolved the smaller, more immediate plot issues, leaving raw and bleeding edges that clearly ought to bind into a greater body of work. It read decently fast, and mostly held my interest, but ultimately felt like just another gritty urban fantasy series in the making.

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