Will it surprise anybody if I tell you I’m kind of a snob when it comes to my reading? Probably not. I mean, I don’t read only Russian or French books, but I sometimes pre-judge novels, especially by genre. I think of myself as a high fantasist, both in my reading and writing. Light urban fantasy, I’ll confess, feels a little like slumming to me. But I must confess, I’m enjoying Dan Willis’s Alex Lockerby novels. They’re fun.

At the end of the previous novel, Alex, a runewright/private eye in a 1930s New York City where magic works, saved the city from a sorcerous disaster. But there was a price – he drained a lot of his life energy in the process. Now his hair has turned white and his hands shake – which is deadly for his bread-and-butter business, drawing precise runes to help people find lost dogs or spouses.

But he hasn’t been forgotten. In Ghost Of a Chance, when a “ghost killer” starts murdering people in locked rooms, one of the tabloid newspapers starts claiming Alex is showing the police how to solve the crimes. It’s not true, and it only makes the cops more hostile to him than they already were. Meanwhile, a woman whose husband has disappeared hires him to find him, and an eminent sorcerer/industrialist makes a bet with Alex to locate an experimental motor that’s been stolen from him.

Alex can’t draw his runes anymore. Which means that he’s going to have to rely on plain deduction to do the job the old-fashioned way. Is he up to it? Or will he find himself locked up for interfering with the police, as they keep threatening? Or even dead?

The prose in the Alex Lockerby books is not of the very highest quality, but the plots move right along and the characters and colorful and lively. Your entertainment dollar will not be wasted. I wish the author had studied up more on one of his characters, though, one who is supposed to be an actual historical figure. I won’t say who he is, but he seems to have changed a lot of his skills and philosophy in this universe.