Johannes Cabal: The Detective

by Jonathan L. Howard, 288 pages

All Johannes Cabal did was try to check out a book. Of course, it was in Krenz University's Special Collection, and he'd attempted to "check it out" at 1:30 in the morning on a national holiday with the intention of keeping it for an "extended, open-ended sort of period." It would not have been a problem, really, if he hadn't been discovered the next morning in the reading room, pinned down by a slobbering mastiff, along with his bag containing a very large and loaded handgun and the library's decidedly non-circulating, one-of-a-kind copy of Principia Necromantica. And for this small infraction, they have tossed him in a cell awaiting his inevitable execution. What's a somewhat infamous necromancer to do?

Escape, of course. And find himself enmeshed in a mid-air murder mystery, confronted by duplicitous spies, clever and not-so-clever thieves, megalomaniac military men plotting coups, evil-incarnate sorcerers, and all-too-real (and mouthy) ghosts from his past. And if that's not enough, his stupid newly-regained soul keeps triggering his long-unused conscience. That thing just gets in the way!

Cabal has rather grown on me. This is his second adventure, the first being Johannes Cabal: The Necromancer, in which he literally makes a deal with the Devil in order to get his soul back after having unadvisedly bargained it away in return for knowledge (read the book if you want to know why he gave it up in the first place and how he goes about getting it back). He is funny, unpredictable, sarcastic, arrogant, single-minded, quite possibly sociopathic, and also--just maybe, on rare occasions, if it suits his very personal, inscrutable purposes and he doesn't stop to talk himself out of it--one of the good guys. Maybe. Or not.

The story takes place in what appears to be a post WWI, pre-WWII Europe with some geo-political and fantastical embellishments in the form of a handful of small, unstable states and aeroships that use ley-lines as guides, which lend a very vague hint of steampunkishness to the setting. Poor Cabal is forced to deal with more live human beings here than he finds tolerable, but I think that's probably for the best, as I'm rooting for him to learn to let go of the past and return to the world of the living, himself. Given his personality, that will be something of a challenge. Hopefully, the author will give him (and us) future opportunity to explore that potential.