Platinum Magic By Dr. Bruce Davis

Platinum Magic

By Dr. Bruce Davis

Before we begin, I must as always issue a disclaimer. I believe a reviewer should always be honest with his audience and admit when there is a prior relationship. I know Dr. Davis personally. I have been a guest in his home and I count his eldest son as one of my greatest and closest friends (Note from the editor: Dr. Davis helped raise me so…). Dr. Davis' family has been very kind to me over the years and has given me friendship, respect and more. As you can imagine I am very fond of all of them. That will not be affecting my grade, as I will, as always, be working to give you my honest opinion on the story itself, based on its own merits and flaws. That said, it would be dishonest of me not to tell you, my readers, that I knew the writer beforehand.

Dr. Davis is a trauma surgeon who lives in the Phoenix Area in Arizona (that's right, another creative writer laboring in this furnace of a valley, if it's not the water, or lack thereof as my editor insists, there must be some special kind of sun-caused madness). Dr. Davis graduated medical school at the University of Illinois in Chicago in the 1970s (which means he's been a doc longer then most of us reading this have been alive). He then joined the navy to serve as a naval doctor doing his residency at Bethesda Naval Hospital. He would meet his wife serving together in the Navy and he served with the Marines in the first Gulf War. He currently lives with his wife, family, and large dogs. Platinum Magic was published in 2018 by Brick Cave Media, founded in 2006 by Bob Nelson. They're currently headquartered in Mesa Arizona.

Platinum Magic is a police procedural set in a fantasy world, however this isn't your average Not! Europe fantasy world but one where a magical industrial revolution has taken place. As such, people use magic mirrors that fit in their pockets to communicate with each other, drive magically powered sleds through the air, enjoy the convenience of running hot and cold water through magic indoor plumbing; the whole nine yards. This is because human wizards methodically and carefully studiedthe magic they learned from the near immortal elves and sussed out rules that allowed them to create repeatable and predictable magical effects that didn't take much magical talent to use. The world isn't perfect however, until very recently it was split along racial lines and in a lot of ways still is. For example the Elves live in the Havens, the Orc homeland is the Azeri Empire, and the Dwarves have their own homeland where they live behind anti-magic barriers. Most humans live in the Commonwealth which is a mixed race society, humans, dwarves, elves, and orcs all live in the Commonwealth with the other races coming in to escape the confines of their own societies.

However, the Commonwealth is not a utopian paradise. The world of Platinum Magic has a history of wars and strife that we would likely recognize from various fantasy novels. As such, dwarves don't like orcs, orcs aren't fond of humans, and the elves look down their noses at everyone (Of course given how many humans with elvish blood there seem to be, it might be only the older elves doing so). For example there's a native orc population in the Commonwealth mostly shoved into reservations or they've moved into ghettos doing the manual labor in magic factories that no one else wants to do. Layered on top of this are class divisions that run within and across racial boundaries born from a combination of only some people having magical talent and the fact that industrialized societies tend towards very unequal societies. That means crime and terrorism, and just like in the real world crime and terrorism often hit the people who can do the least about it. Of course wherever there is crime and terrorist acts, there’s a police force to contain and control it. Enter our main character King's Agent Simon Buckley and his partner and foster father Haldron Stonebender. When they get a tip about an illegal bomb factory set up in a suburban home, they expect to find a bunch of orc terrorists. What they get is the estranged sister of the ruler of the Elvish Havens doing illegal blood magic and more. When she dies in the raid, our King's Agents find themselves on the edge of an international incident that could threaten their careers, their lives, and their good names (Interesting order those are in…). They'll find themselves digging deep into a conspiracy that could set the nations of their world at war and made up of the unlikest co-plotters. What does the family that rules the Elvish Haven have to do with a group of Orcish terrorists anyway?

The story is told through the first person perspective of Simon Buckley, as he digs into the mystery of what the hell was going on in that suburban home he raided. It's bad enough that he has to deal with the Elvish government breathing down his back and that he has to conduct the investigation with a way-too-attractive Elvish Ranger named Sylvie whose appearance invokes a lot of memories for Simon (Unintentional sexual harassment panda?). He also has to do this with a Lt. who is desperate to curry political favor and all too willing to offer up Simon's head on a stake to get it (Hmmm. I’ve seen this before. In The Wire. Anyone man enough to walk the streets with Omar?). Simon is going to have to work off the books, with someone he's not sure he can trust but is finding himself emotionally pushed to trust anyway.

Simon is an interesting if straight forward character. He's not stupid or naive but still believes in laws and justice and thinks racism is wrong but dances around confronting Hal over his racism against Orcs (I was gonna comment on my racial profiling suspicion earlier…). For that matter for all his belief in laws, he is perfectly willing to break a law to prevent something worse from happening. As the investigation spirals into bigger and bigger problems and pulls up memories from his past he’d rather not deal with, we get a good luck at who Simon is. He is a good if flawed man, trying to do his best. Doc Davis' strength is he can write a character like this without drifting into melodrama or getting Simon to stuck up his own rear to get anything done. Which can be a hard needle to thread, but Doc Davis does it rather well.

We learn a bit about Hal and Sylvie as well in this story. Hal is an older married dwarf who, like many dwarves, lives in the Commonwealth. That said, there are a lot of questions about what went on in Hal's past, if Hal literally has a lifetime of experience on Simon, why is Simon his Sgt instead of the other way around? Seeing as the Captain of the peacekeeper station they work out of is a Dwarf, I highly doubt it's a race issue (unless Dwarves have a different seniority track to offset their longer lives?[that actually would make a degree of sense, otherwise younger officers would live and die unpromoted]). Hal doesn't display any envy at his adopted son being promoted over him. If anything Hal is proud of his human son, and is mostly concerned at his physical and mental well being. So I find myself wondering at Hal's backstory. I kinda hope to see more of this in the future and if Doc Davis writes more I hope he digs more into Hal and Simon's relationship because I don't think we've ever had an adopted father and son fighting crime before, or at least I haven't (Other than Batman and his various adopted emotional proxies er, I mean children). Sylvie is interesting herself, presenting an alternative take on elves as opposed to the scheming politicians who keep throwing roadblocks in Simon's way. She also moves pretty quickly for an immortal, making her romantic interest in Simon clear after a couple days. I suppose when you've been alive for awhile you learn what you like and worry less about it. Or maybe she's in a hurry because she's worried Simon could die any decade now. Time must look a lot different to her then us after all. Since this is all from Simon's viewpoint we actually don't get a lot on Sylvie. For that matter we don't get to see a lot of the rest of Simon's squad, the dwarf/human pair of Jack and Ham, or the new-kid mage Laim. Again one of the weaknesses of choosing to do your story completely from inside the head of a single character.

I really enjoyed the world building in this novel. Instead of presenting us with Not Europe! or an exact copy of our own world but with magic, we get a completely alternate world with a completely different history. Which is, frankly, realistic. A world with more than one sapient species in it and with the ability for people to shoot fireballs at each other with a word is going to be radically different from ours. Ethnic divisions within humanity are going to matter less when there is a literal horde of bug eyed monsters coming to eat your children, to give one example. It's not just that, there's a lot of little things that stack up to create the feeling of a very different world. The characters use understandable but very different phrases. No one says hi or goodbye in this book, they say good meeting or good parting. No one says alright, they say all good. Little things like that help create a very real sense of being somewhere else. Doc Davis also plays the history of his world close to his vest. There are no massive infodumps here, you pick things up by their mention in natural conversations between the characters. Let me define my terms here. Infodumping is a term for when characters have a long speeches detailing some part of how their world works, either the technology or the magic or the history of the world even when all the characters present would already know this information. Another term for it is the dreaded As You Know Speech, after the phrase that usually starts an infodump. There are some writers, (looking at you Weber) who won't even bother to put that information into the mouths of the character and just dump it into the story as plain text. I know there are people who enjoy reading a good infodump and I would agree there are some stories that work with that but in all honesty it's very easy to break the pace of the story with an infodump and bog it down. Doc Davis instead prefers to give us passing details about the world and focusing on really letting us get to know Simon and pulling us into the mystery at hand. Which works because having to fill in the gaps is a good way to get your readers pulled in, especially when you have the world building supported by little details that enforce the feeling that these characters don't come from our world.

The pace of the book is fairly fast. The novel is barely over 300 pages; which is both a good thing and a bad thing. On the one hand there are things in the story that I wish had more time and space devoted to them. I honestly wanted to see more of the other characters and there just wasn't space in the novel for them. For example Molly, Hal's wife and Simon's foster mother, looms large in Simon's thoughts but she doesn't get a lot of time on page. Hal could have used more screen time, as well as the rest of the squad. On the other hand in this era of bloated fantasy novels that could be used as hand to hand weapons due to their size and weight, it's good to see a writer actually buckle down and tell me a story without wondering all over the damn place. If you're used to reading Robert Jordan or George RR Martin, this is going to be a fairly big change of pace. I do hope if we revisit these characters in future books that we get to spend more time with them and see a bit more of their world. Another thing about the novel is the mix of predictable and unpredictable plot beats. There are some that are lifted right out of a 1980s cop movie and others that are fairly unique. Part of it is the world, there are times where it almost feels Victorian and other times when it feels perfectly 21st century and still other times when it feels like the pure fantasy novel it is. This is all done fairly well and Doc Davis uses elements that we've seen a hundred times before to hide the surprises in the plot until the very last minute like a stage magician. I honestly very much enjoyed the book, but if you're not a fan of police stories this isn't going for work for you. That said I'm giving Platinum Magic an A-. Much of the issues come from the relentless single view point of the story but it's done really well and will likely bother you a lot less then bothers me.

Next Week, we return to Warp World!  Keep Reading!

This review edited by Dr. Ben Allen.