I picked up this book because of the cover… I mean, come on. Isn’t that gorgeous?! It’s got the silhouette thing going, with an image inside the silhouette, and the font… wow. I always download the e-book free samples of books first, and if that hooks me, then I’ll buy the audio version. I went for this one because even though not a whole lot happened in the first few pages, the story did introduce title character R.F. Jackaby— and he’s basically Sherlock Holmes. I LOVE Sherlock. So no matter what the rest of the story was like, I was in. (If you’ve read Uncanny Valley, you might have noticed that Francis is very Holmesian, too. That’s totally intentional.)
Because Jackaby is SO much like Sherlock, I likened the story to the originals by Conan Doyle all the way through. The part of John Watson in this case is played by Ms. Abigail Rook, a teenager who ran away from home, eager for adventure. Jackaby hires her as his investigative assistant, and she helps him solve crimes. But there’s one original twist: Jackaby is a Seer. That is, he sees past the Mundane, and sees the truth—which may involve trolls, banshees, gremlins, werewolves, or any number of other supernatural creatures. He shares his flat with a ghost named Jenny. His last investigative assistant got turned into a duck—and while he could change back now, he refuses to do so because he’s “stubborn.” These little quirks made the story, I thought: for example, Abigail narrates the story in the first person, and she omits Chapter 13 “by request of her employer.” There’s another character whom Jackaby says sees the world topsy-turvy, and sometimes in opposites; it’s very hard to determine when she is describing a real or an imagined event. Abigail asks if she’s crazy, and Jackaby’s response is that she’s a hero: “she’s saved the world many times over. The fact that it was all in her mind does not lessen the bravery of it.” (Loved that line. It made me think, too… a simple task for one person might seem monumental to another with a different worldview. And from the outside, who would know?)
In every other respect, though, the story was a typical murder mystery, and I honestly got a little bored with it. The characters had potential, but I felt that they lacked any sense of internal conflict or arc from beginning to end. Jackaby is emotionless and totally unflappable, and his relationship with Abigail is strictly professional—they don’t otherwise seem to care about each other at all. Abigail is a player in the story, but she’s not really trying to learn anything new about herself. She’s not emotionally invested in any of the characters (aside from having a crush on a relatively peripheral one). She’s curious about the proceedings, but I didn’t feel like they had any real meaning to her except for when she found herself physically threatened. I think if the story held personal meaning for Abigail somehow, or perhaps if Jackaby had been flawed in an intriguing way, this could have been a five star book. As it was…
My rating: ***
But Jackaby is flawed. He’s “emotionless and totally unflappable” which you found intriguing.
Is that a flaw? I guess it depends on how you look at it. I’d consider it one I suppose, but in the sense that the flaw is that he has no flaws. 🙂