Review: Johnny Lycan & the Vegas Berserker: Book 2 of The Werewolf PI

Johnny Lycan & the Vegas Berserker: Book 2 of The Werewolf PI by Wayne Turmel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm entering this series at Book 2, but there's enough previously-on that I didn't feel disoriented, probably helped by the fact that it takes place in a different city from the previous book and with a number of new characters, the key secondary characters from Book 1 playing only minor roles.

From a storytelling point of view, it deserves its place on my Best of the Year list. It's an urban fantasy with a noir feel, and the lycanthrope of the title is a classic noir PI; kind of morally grimy but generally well-intentioned, with a tendency to get badly beaten up, and well aware that he's not the smartest person in the story. In fact, Johnny claims that his other superpower, apart from being a werewolf, is that everyone assumes he's smarter than he actually is. He also claims not to be a good man, and arguably he's right, but also arguably he's wrong. It kind of depends on how you look at it.

Sent on what appears to be a simple retrieval of an item from Las Vegas for his boss in Chicago, he discovers that what was supposed to be a fake may not be; that his boss's rival for the acquisition of the item is going to stop at nothing to have it; that someone on the seller's side is working their own game; and that things are generally complicated, with a tendency to cause issues for Johnny in particular.

It's a well-told story with well-drawn characters. There is a problem, however.

I've noticed that books I get via Netgalley from Black Rose Writing are often worse than average in terms of basic writing mechanics like punctuation and grammar; that doesn't seem to be something they screen for when deciding what books to publish, and it also doesn't seem to be something they work on before releasing the books through Netgalley for review. I don't know if they edit them between that point and publication, but I really hope they do, especially this one. I thought I'd seen pretty much every way you could mess up the punctuation of a sentence, but this book managed to show me a couple that were new to me, as well as some I'd only seen once or twice before, and a nearly complete collection of the common ones. It's also weak on tense, sometimes using present tense where it should be past, or simple past where it should be past perfect.

I don't usually tag the books I get from Netgalley as "needs-editing" on Goodreads, because I assume (perhaps optimistically) that there's at least another round of edits to come after I see them, but this one is so dire that even a very good editor will struggle to remove all the issues.

Having said that, based on storytelling alone, it does make the Bronze tier of my Best of the Year for 2022.

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