I don’t remember where I saw a recommendation for The Last Smile in Sunder City (2020) by Luke Arnold, but it came up in my library queue after being on hold for a number of weeks. Thanks, unknown benefactor! The worldbuilding here is complex yet convincing, the protagonist has an interesting journey, and the plot kept me interested with twists, turns, and revelations.
From the publisher’s summary: In a world that’s lost its magic, a former soldier turned PI solves cases for the fantasy creatures whose lives he ruined in an imaginative debut fantasy by Black Sails actor Luke Arnold.
Fetch Phillips has had a hard life: orphaned young, never quite fitting comfortably in any society where he’s lived after that, and addicted to painkillers following the war of humans vs. pretty much everyone and everything else. He’s also saddled with a huge amount of guilt due to the role he played in that war, which resulted in the Magic Going Away everywhere, which killed a number of highly magical species and maimed a lot of members of slightly less magical species (e.g. rapid aging among elves), not to mention all the people mourning the losses of their loves and livelihoods. Even regular, nonmagical humans are struggling because the economy crashed hard. The city of Sunder’s streets are mean, due to the war’s destruction but also due to the people who live there now, few of whom look far beyond their own day-to-day survival.
Now a private investigator, Fetch takes on a missing-person case, looking for a beloved teacher who suddenly stopped showing up to work. His search takes him on some unexpected journeys through the city he thought he knew, rubbing up against old acquaintances and making some new ones. Along the way, he has to face up against some hard truths from his own past and about the reality he lives in now.
At the beginning, Fetch reminds me a little bit of policeman-turned PI Matthew Scudder in the crime novels by Lawrence Block; in the beginning of that series, Scudder is an unacknowledged alcoholic, and isn’t a lot of fun to be around, despite his perceptiveness and dark sense of humor. A lot of people don’t appreciate Fetch either, including Fetch himself, but he does have a lot of persistence, i.e. the willingness to keep poking his nose where he isn’t wanted.
A lot of Fetch’s problems in life have come from his desperate need to belong and be appreciated, but he can’t quite swallow the hypocrisies that various factions are promoting, at least not when the lies become obvious enough. So he keeps going down various wrong paths, having revelations, and then dealing with them.
One of those lies is the one that a lot of humans have been telling themselves, or at least that the human leaders have been telling the masses, i.e. that nonhumans are the source of humanity’s problems. This makes it easy to promote the lie that the war against nonhumans is a war of self-defense. This obviously has a lot of resonance with current realities in our world, with so many of society’s ills being blamed on immigrants, but it also is very relevant to any instance of Othering.
Anyway, due to having followed a mistaken path before, Fetch is now disposed to give nonhumans the benefit of the doubt over humans. But he has decidedly mixed feelings when he finds out what kind of creature the missing teacher is (or was), and what kind of person he wanted to be. Meanwhile, he’s getting indications that this case may be about much more than one person.
Like I said, I really enjoyed the worldbuilding in this book, and that includes the social structures and interspecies politics that tangle up Fetch. Allies become enemies, enemies become allies, and every day is full of hard choices. Sometimes, Fetch looks toward the greater good, but sometimes, the heart just wants what the heart wants.
The Last Smile in Sunder City is a really interesting and engaging novel. I think it stands alone just fine, although there are obviously undercurrents that will be going somewhere, but in fact it’s the first book in a series. It’ll be quite a while before I can pursue any followups, though, since I have a couple of months of Hugo Awards reading to get through.
Content warnings: Grisly deaths, violence, drug addiction, betrayals, and references to mass die-offs, deaths, and maimings/dysfunctionalities.
Disclaimer: None. I love libraries!
