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A review by ruzgofdi
Priest by Matthew Colville
2.0
I get the sense of what the author was trying to do here. The hardboiled detective story, told in a fantasy world. The titular priest takes the role of the detective that's been through much before he gets hired to solve this story's murder. And I think we hit a lot of the tropes of that kind of story along the way: the society of figures that the hero needs to investigate that want nothing to do with him, the innocent that needs saving, the woman that seems decides to throw herself at the hero for not much of a reason, and corruption of various important individuals.
Now I'm not highly familiar with this particular style/genre. I'm sure some of the mystery stories I've read before have fallen into it. So I'm not sure if one of my issues with the book is a bug or a feature. But I don't feel like there's any chance for the reader to come close to solving the mystery on their own. There are no clues for the priest to study. There are no witnesses willing to answer the priest's questions. He just spins his wheels until he gives up and goes home, and only then does he have some kind of epiphany that brings him back to try to fix the case again.
My other major issue is in the mechanics. It's very clear at times that this is a self-published work. There were a few times where you could spot where the writer had taken a break and come back to a line and because of doing so ended up repeating part of the sentence to get going again. The big one though is when, in the middle of an action sequence, the priest ends up having flashbacks to his time as an adventurer for hire. So we get alternating paragraphs between the present with the hero's ally trying to save them both and the past where the hero was traumatized. Except there's no warning when the two switch. It's literally a paragraph change, and the story has shifted perspective. There is no change of type to show we're in the hero's head. There's no line to break the two portions up when there's a switch. It feels like the author wrote both parts separately and then copied and pasted the one into the other without checking to see how they flowed together.
Now I'm not highly familiar with this particular style/genre. I'm sure some of the mystery stories I've read before have fallen into it. So I'm not sure if one of my issues with the book is a bug or a feature. But I don't feel like there's any chance for the reader to come close to solving the mystery on their own. There are no clues for the priest to study. There are no witnesses willing to answer the priest's questions. He just spins his wheels until he gives up and goes home, and only then does he have some kind of epiphany that brings him back to try to fix the case again.
My other major issue is in the mechanics. It's very clear at times that this is a self-published work. There were a few times where you could spot where the writer had taken a break and come back to a line and because of doing so ended up repeating part of the sentence to get going again. The big one though is when, in the middle of an action sequence, the priest ends up having flashbacks to his time as an adventurer for hire. So we get alternating paragraphs between the present with the hero's ally trying to save them both and the past where the hero was traumatized. Except there's no warning when the two switch. It's literally a paragraph change, and the story has shifted perspective. There is no change of type to show we're in the hero's head. There's no line to break the two portions up when there's a switch. It feels like the author wrote both parts separately and then copied and pasted the one into the other without checking to see how they flowed together.