Alex Verus, Books 1 & 2
4.0 Stars
2-20-2022

An enjoyable, low-key, Dresden-adjacent series of Urban Fantasy books. I liked it! The book takes an interesting tack in making the protagonist a Diviner, someone who does not have supernatural strength or spells or whatever, but who can see the future. Or at least likely futures, or at least the likely futures that aren't too far in the future. Since the protagonist lives in a world of powerful mages and other supernatural beings, he spends a lot of time hiding, running, and generally trying to use his limited pre-cognition in order to avoid being killed.

The author has a lot of fun with the concept, and does a decent job of exploring both the exploits and boundaries of pre-cognition. One of the good choices is that the pre-cognition isn't absolute or cost free; rather it is like having to parse through the server logs of the universe. Doing so is a skill that takes time and attention to use, and becomes progressively more slow and complex the further out you go and the more relevant branches & factors there are. Some quick examples:
While the main character (Alex) is talking to the villain, Alex mentally flicks through several conversational gambits and sees that they cause his own death in the next ~10 seconds. Alex then chooses the conversational path that does not result in immediate violence.
Alex needs to talk to someone to get information. Rather than actually traveling to them and conversing, Alex stays on the couch and searches for the future in which he did get off the couch, travel, and converse. So he gets the information without having to go through the intervening steps or actually do the work. As a lazy person, this is an intensely appealing power fantasy!


Other minor notes: I appreciate that the series is set in London, and avoids all the US cultural bullshit that you find in the Dresden novels. E.g. there are no cops or priests, you can assume everyone is an atheist, the MC doesn't have a gun on him all the time, etc. etc. The female characters are also 80% less cheese-cakey. On the downside, the side-kicks are less interesting than in the Dresden series. Luna is a particular stick in the mud, with her constant complaining about "waaaah, my curse kills everyone who I care about, waaaaah". Lady, we all have problems. Alex is also a complete duff romantically, and fails to follow through on the obvious love interest, Delio/Rachel, the insane-Nietzschian shadow mage. A catch like that is not going to stay single for long! On the neutral side, I wish the author had gone slightly deeper and weirder in his exploration of what it would be like to have your consciousness exist in this hybrid of the present & possible futures. The author touches on this (e.g. the main character has seen his own potential deaths many hundreds of times), but I think he could go a bit further.

Anyway! Apparently there another 100 hundred books in the series, and I'm looking forward to seeing where the author takes the story.