Good Guys (Stephen Brust)

Good Guys
Stephen Brust
Tor
Fiction, Action/Crime/Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Since at least the Middle Ages, the secretive order of the Mystici helped the world's sorcerers - people sensitive to the forces known as magic, the power lines encircling the earth that can be manipulated to perform spells and wonders - stay safe from the mundane majority, but it's only been since the early 20th century that the Foundation rose to rival them, a breakaway group that works to enforce secrecy and rein in those who risk exposing magic. Usually, they maintain a tense standoff, but when a series of murders targets Mystici operatives across America (and risks exposing the existence of magic with very public displays of power), one Foundation investigation team finds themselves stepping on all sorts of toes, and unearthing all sorts of trouble.
Donovan may have no magic himself, but he owes his life to the Foundation after he was shot four times by a police officer for a petty violation. With his photographic memory and prodigious detection skills, he quickly became one of their top investigators. Along with trained muscle Susan and his newest assistant, the sorcerer Marci on her first field assignment, he catches the first in what turns into a string of increasingly public and grisly deaths, each involving the use of magic. Donovan finds himself of mixed mind about the affair: while the killer is no doubt dangerous and only getting moreso with each murder, none of the people they have killed are what anyone would call good. There are also disturbing signs that the killer may have ties to his own organization. But the Foundation is supposed to be the good side, opposing the morally gray-to-black sorcerers of the Mystici... aren't they?

REVIEW: Good Guys uses urban fantasy to probe the oft-explored question of what happens when great power comes without great responsibilities or moral restraints, and how easily the line between good and evil, that seems so clear in theory, blurs in the real world. Donovan in particular already has a sizeable chip on his shoulder, not entirely unjustified, for a life made far harder than it needs to be because of racism. He, of all the investigators, understands the frustrations that can lead an otherwise ordinary person to become consumed with the need for vengeance and the temptation to suspend personal moral codes when the opportunity to end an injustice arises. The Foundation doesn't exactly do itself any favors, either, having become half-paralyzed by its own bureaucracy and refusal to trust even its own agents with information they need to know; being a half-paranoid organization lends itself to hiring half-paranoid people who keep secrets from each other as much out of habit as out of actually having anything to hide. The investigation unwinds through a thicket of names and motivations that sometimes grows a bit dense, but eventually comes together, if rather circuitously and after a fair bit of death and danger and action of the magical and mundane varieties.
While the story is decent enough for what it is (for the most part), what cost it the half-star in the ratings is a sense that it was trying to set up a series that apparently never happened. Time is wasted on establishing characters who never reach their potential in this volume and plot points that never quite tie up, and I kept feeling like there was some bigger twist or resolution just a few pages ahead that I never reached by the time the book ended. The characters also tended to be somewhat flat and unchanging. It all left me with a vaguely unsatisfied feeling by the end, for all that it moves decently and parts of it work rather well. Even if there were a sequel, I don't expect I'd be pursuing it.

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