Hammers on Bone

Hammers on Bone by Cassandra Khaw is the first novella in the Persons Non Grata series, currently comprised of two volumes. The main character is a Lovecraftian creature inhabiting a hardboiled noir detective body which takes on a case in a modern urban London. The mix of Cosmicism with thick detective vernacular in a modern setting is a wild mix, but it works. If you enjoy characters like Constantine or Harry Dresden, and the horrors of Cosmicism, this is probably for you. In fact, in a way, the deep mixing of genres and the narrative voice, reminds me a bit of Glen Cook’s Garrett P.I. series. A good start to a series, which builds its setting well and quickly. The story has a nice twist on the detective procedural, and doesn’t require any particular familiarity with either noir or Lovecraftian genres. Approachable, quick, and fun; with promise for more.

I made 87 highlights, but a lot of those were about formatting errors, including a pervasive snafu where a superfluous line break was added before words in italic causing sentences to split across lines, and only around 10 of them are proper highlights. But, even still, the ebook was readable, if a bit jarring.