R.S. Belcher returns to his popular urban fantasy world with The Night Dahlia, the latest adventure of peerless (and reckless) modern-day wizard, Laytham Ballard.
Remember how the book Nightwise ended with Laytham having bartered three years of his life to the Devil? It’s a few years later and things have gotten, if possible, even worse. The former member of the Nightwise order is now out of friends, off the wagon, and with very little left to his name (he even bartered his shadow away at some point).
It takes a very large bribe from one of the most powerful Fae crime families to convince him to take on a new job: find the mob boss’s daughter Caern Ankou who disappeared without a trace nine years ago. The trail starts in a mansion in Greece and runs through the worst that Los Angeles has to offer, and Laytham soon finds out that the disappearance is tied to a cold case that destroyed his career and started him on a path of self-destruction at eighteen years old.
Fans of R.S Belcher will already know that the author has always taken a very dark tone with this series, but there needs to be a lot of caution signs all over this installment: this book is flat-out harrowing. Laytham’s first appearance is when he’s trying to recapture the escaped soul of a serial killer who’s possessed the body of a nine-year-old boy and is currently on a rampage through his elementary class with a gun. Yes, the story starts in the middle of a school shooting. Trigger warnings aplenty for how that turns out. Banishing the demon doesn’t fix anything – certainly not for the little boy who’ll have to live with being a murderer for the rest of his life – and you can forgive Laytham for “celebrating” by drinking an entire bottle of three-thousand-dollar whiskey and passing out in an alley.
The wider the doors of perception were thrown open, the more you began to wish someone would shut the fucking door and stop letting all the damned flies in.
The book is also one hell of a ride. This is an alternate universe where magic and monsters are everywhere, even if they’re hidden from most people. Fae crime families are heroin dealers, street gangs have Aztec wizards as muscle. Autopsies involve interviewing the corpse, and ghosts reborn as crows work on the police force. Golems are employed as club bouncers, TV personalities can have hidden talents like fortune-telling with cheese, and popular apps can be contaminated with viruses that make users sacrifice people to Japanese gods.
And porn? Even gods are involved with the porn industry, and illegal sex shows can get way out of hand when you can use magic and captive supernatural creatures in the act.
Laytham’s life has always been complicated, so a simple missing-person case spirals out in every direction, with extra missions and side-quests piling one on top of each other. Just about every chapter there will be a diversion for Laytham to track down someone who knows someone, or get into a fight, or just sit in a bar and pour heroic amounts of alcohol down his throat. The story goes back in time to show us the start of the unsolved case that got Laytham kicked out of the Nightwise, and at one point he interviews a rather famous lunatic in prison for “research”.
There was a loud clank as the heavy door closed and locked, and I was alone with the self-proclaimed Devil. Having met them both, I have to say, Charlie was scarier.
The author fills up this bizarre setting and off-the-hook adventure with some very interesting characters. There’s Vigil, the Ankou Family henchman who has orders to not let Laytham out of his sight (anyone else would have given up after the first five attempts to lose him, but Vigil’s a shockingly good henchman. And pretty handy with a dry comment when needed.) There’s Anna the dominatrix, and her friend Lauren (God, I love Lauren, I love the entire concept of Lauren, and anyone who knows me will understand why), and a host of other people who over the years Laytham has befriended, antagonized, or had sex with (sometimes all three). Any time a new character is introduced it’s a toss up whether they’re going to make a cutting remark, start shooting on sight, or try once again to convince Laytham that he does in fact deserve to have people who care about him.
This last option is the real problem because Laytham is, not kidding here, a horrible person.
This is a man who loves pushing things to the limit, loves wading into a dangerous situation and then making things worse because he just can’t resist poking the bear. There’s very little of Laytham’s history that isn’t pain, and he lashes out in truly awful ways. Sometimes that’s satisfying, sometimes you can feel his soul shriveling when he crosses another line, because atrocities committed for a good reason are still atrocities. Even his friends will admit that some people would have been better off if they’d never met him, because if there’s one thing that he’s addicted to more than a steady stream of booze and drugs, it’s surviving. At any cost.
I’ve made a lifetime out of getting to know me, and I can assure you that there is no noble heart hidden under that moth-eaten soul. I tried to be that, and I failed, I kept on failing.
Laytham makes no excuses for himself; he regrets each and every horrible thing he’s done, but he knows that “feeling bad” makes exactly zero difference. His need to prove that someone can hit rock bottom and somehow find their way 
back drives most of the plot. I’m actually a little surprised that Belcher could fit in that much philosophical soul-searching (literally), because the book is pretty much a non-stop mix of battles (made of equal parts spells and bullets), human sacrifices, last-second rescues, rock and roll (have youtube at the ready, because the author loves to set the tone with his favorite music), a centuries-old conspiracy, and a litany of the worst things that can happen to someone who runs away from home at thirteen years old.
It’s going to be interesting to see how many of Laytham’s friends are going to want to stick around as the series goes on. There’s a really high body count in this book, and just about anyone would start to wonder if they’re going to be the next person who’ll get caught in the crossfire of Laytham Ballard’s life.