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Low Town: The Straight Razor Cure: Low Town 1

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The best part of this noir/fantasy mashup is that I feel that this is not just a noir book with fantasy furniture or vice versa. Both the elements of noir and the elements of fantasy are essential to the story. For instance, the voice and the concept of the story would fail miserably without the noir part, and the plot would be impossible without the fantasy elements. Is the piece good or bad? Forget objectivity, taste plays too big of a role to determine the objective value of a piece. Instead, assessing a piece's goal is more valuable; every piece has a goal/intent no matter how small. These goals are often the promises made in a book's synopsis or movie's trailer, but other times a goal can be the successful conveyance of metaphor as well. The Strait Razor Cure, ωστόσο, έρχεται και αποδεικνύει ότι μπορεί να γίνει τόσο καλό όσο και ενδιαφέρον, με τον Daniel Polansky - κάνοντας μόλις το μυθιστορηματικό ντεμπούτο του - να συνδυάζει δύο αντίθετα είδη, προσαρμόζοντάς τα στην ιστο��ία με ένα αλλόκοτο, κι όμως δυνατό τρόπο, πηγαίνοντάς μας βαθιά μέσα στα σκοτεινά, βρώμικα μυστικά της, και σε έναν χαρακτήρα που κρύβει ένα ακόμη ασχημότερο παρελθόν που θα κάνει τα πάντα στην δύναμή του για να προστατέψει τα πιστεύω του και αυτούς που νοιάζεται.

The world itself is fairly vivid and well-realised: the majority of Low Town is dirty and ugly - as are many of its inhabitants - and it is rife with moral and physical corruption. It's full of drugs, murder, organised crime and bigotry, and the author effectively uses the first person narration of the main character to implicate the reader in various kinds of casual and normalised delinquency. I must be honest. I don't see it....at all. I've noticed this before about fans of Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden books. We can agree on those books but apparently we all find vastly different things in them as when we get to "recommending" books to each other that remind us of them we DISAGREE big time. Although the northern rampart was identified as a prehistoric earthwork in the C19, the monument appears to have only been recognised in print as a hillfort as late as 1960 when it was included in Nicholas Thomas’s ‘Guide to Prehistoric England’. However the cutting of the Kilburn White Horse immediately adjacent in 1857, inspired by the Uffington White Horse which is also closely associated with a hillfort, suggests that the existence of the hillfort was recognised locally in the mid-C19. In the 1960s about two thirds of the interior of the hillfort, along with the western half of the northern rampart was levelled and reseeded with grass to improve its use by the gliding club which had been established on the plateau above Roulston Scar in the 1930s. A remaining section of the northern rampart was then investigated by archaeological excavation by Tony Pacitto in 1969-1970, in advance of building work for the gliding club. Pacitto concluded that the earthwork represented an early/middle Iron Age ‘box rampart’ probably dated to around 500-400 BC. The monument was added to the Schedule in 1997 and was subsequently, in 2001, the subject of a detailed archaeological survey by Historic England (then English Heritage).There is 0% romance in this. It is completely absent except for the crush of a girl from The Wardens past that was unrequited there wasn’t even a glimmer of hope for a smidge of romance even in the future. I don’t have to have much but I like to have a ‘ship’ of some sort in almost everything I read. Early on, I expected this to be a novel with a strong protagonist and a bunch of flat side characters, but instead I found that many of the bit players eventually take on enough life to become interesting in their own right. Adolphus, who runs the Staggering Earl bar and soldiered with Warden in the past, shows a gruff but good-natured demeanor that eventually reveals a softer side. (For some reason, he reminded me of Walter Sobchak from The Big Lebowski.) Wren is a razor-sharp street urchin who becomes Warden’s protégé. The Crane is the First Sorcerer of the Realm, responsible for saving the city in the past but now fading into old age, and Celia is his apprentice. Crispin is Warden’s former partner in the city’s police force (and at one point memorably tells Warden “You’ve become everything you ever hated.”) Several of these characters start out being one-dimensional but eventually many of them take on enough detail and personality to become fascinating in their own right. Despite initial appearances, Low Town isn’t a one man show, which is promising for future novels in this series. Although the basic street layout of the Low Town still exists to this day, it can be difficult to imagine how the area appeared up to the early 1900s, and while those dark days of North Shields have long since disappeared, much of the area is virtually unrecognisable today, while a schedule of redevelopment and modernisation continues to progress.

The most common property types available for sale in Low Town, WV15 are 1 bedroom flats and 4 bedroom detached houses.Bridgnorth itself is a picturesque and historic market town that has its origins in the 12th Century. The town is divided into High Town and Low Town - High Town being set on a sandstone ridge one hundred feet above the river, with Low Town situated alongside the river and the two are connected not only by main traffic routes but also by several strategically placed flights of steps and an historic funicular railway. Tara, ένα νεαρό κορίτσι που είχε εξαφανιστεί για μέρες, δολοφονημένη, και χρησιμοποιημένη με τον σκληρότερο τρόπο για τις επιθυμίες ενός διεστραμμένου μυαλού, ο Warden θα πρέπει να καλέσει τους παλιούς συναδέλφούς του - κάποιους που από την τελευταία τους συνάντηση τον άφησε μετά βίας ζωντανό - για να αναλάβουν την υπόθεση αυτή όπως μόνο αυτοί μπορούν να λύσουν.

It was bought by the MP for Stone, Sir William Cash in 1969 (father of the current owner) and following a restoration has welcomed the public on open days since the 1970s.Since these early beginnings, North Shields has grown into the town it is today, leaving a wealth of history in its wake. Well, see for yourself. It's not a bad book and apparently there's a feel that many readers like immensely and really get into. It must be a matter of taste. For me this was mediocre at best. Will I follow it up? The pace is so uneven it made me think I was suffering from ADHD. One minute the story was gripping and captivating and stuff, and the next I was skimming away like a maniac. Towards the end I think I skimmed more than I read. Sigh. The story might have been more interesting and faster paced, had the author focused a bit more on developing the world vs. trying waaayyyyyy too hard to make an atmospheric read of it. But he didn't, so it didn't.

Low Town's goal isn't too complicated: to be a gritty, noir story told from the streets of a dour fantasy city. In pursuit of this goal, Low Town makes every effort to pull all the bells and whistles. Drug dealers, gang violence, lost loves, grizzled veterans. The protagonist, the nameless "Warden", and his bleak outlook on life, combined with all of the aforementioned tropes, succeed in ensuring that the noir feel is both palpable and fully realized. The Warden runs the dreamsnake and pixie’s breath drug trade in Low Town, the ghetto area of Rigus.But this is so much more than Marlowe with magic. There is a city struggling with the aftermath of a plague and a war, which add elements of 1660s London and early twentieth century England to the delicious stew that Polanski is cooking. The Warden has a dark past forged in a gruellng warfare of trenches and incompetence. Maybe it is the bloodbath of Verdun, or the torment of Iwo Jima's meat grinder, either way the Warden's reminiscences evoke a vivid impression of the horrors of war, of sundered comradeship. The finale of the war also resonates with the end of the second world war, an unimaginable weapon unleashed that destroys the enemy and saves lives. But this is not a nuclear bomb it is a vile work of magic, and the Warden did not see the last of it when the war ended. Nos va descubriendo cómo cayó en desgracia este ex-agente pero se acaba el libro y nos hemos enterado de todo su pasado (supongo que en los siguientes...no editados en castellano).

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