Synopsis:
After having spent entirely too long stuck in a parallel dimension hunting supernatural beasts, Calvin Ryder has found his way home. Much to his chagrin, the monsters are here too; he just never knew about them. Now he’s expanded his traditional private detective business to include eradicating dangerous mythological creatures and tracking down rogue mages—no sense in letting a good hunt go to waste. Navigating secret societies, trying to be a better person for his wife and friends, and operating behind the scenes of the modern day to keep monsters at bay…he’s got his work cut out for him.
So it’s a real annoyance when a woman hires him to save her kid, who’s been transformed into a cannibalistic beast, without killing him. What a buzzkill.
Review:
I read this book as a judge for Fanfiaddict for SPFBO XI. These are my personal thoughts and do not represent the thoughts of the whole team.
Between the characters and the world Aaron Daggit has created for his book Butcher Boy and his Votker Archives planned series, there is a lot to like. Calvin Ryder is a fairly well-developed main character who reads a lot like he belongs somewhere between Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden books and Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter series. Ryder goes after the worst of the worst of the supernatural that has leaked into our world and has even spent years in other worlds that are teeming with the beasts.
One of the nice things about Butcher Boy is the overall world created around Ryder, with Votker as a world-wide organization that helps coordinate investigations and cleanups of incidents to make sure the public is kept in the dark by magic and magical creatures. Ryder has an interesting stable of helpers that create weapons, craft magical items, and help throughout his investigation.
While those are the highlights, I struggled with the story overall. Butcher Boy starts on a high, showing Ryder in the middle of an investigation and the action that commences when he discovers what happened to a couple of girls in the woods. But, it just slows way down after that. When a woman comes to him to find her ten-year-old son without harming him (after he somehow mutated and then ate the family dog!), it seems to take about half the book before he actually comes face to face with the issue. The book lacked urgency, especially given that a boy was missing and was potentially homicidal for whatever reason. Side quest after side quest took us to meet some interesting supporting characters, but rarely seemed to move the plot along.
And Daggit can describe a scene. There was rarely a place that Ryder went that you didn’t know everything about, but sometimes that became a little distracting, especially when I was trying to understand why he wasn’t trying to find the titular boy.
When Daggit writes more books in this Votker Archives series (and I do hope he does), I hope they just rip right along. He did a ton of world and character-building in Butcher Boy, so he can just dive right into the next book without a ton of setup next time around.
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