Review: The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

The City of Lost Fortunes (Crescent City #1) by Bryan Camp
Format: ebook
Source: publisher
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: urban fantasy
Series: Crescent City #1
Pages: 367
Published by John Joseph Adams/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on April 17, 2018
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

The fate of New Orleans rests in the hands of a wayward grifter in this novel of gods, games, and monsters.

The post–Katrina New Orleans of The City of Lost Fortunes is a place haunted by its history and by the hurricane’s destruction, a place that is hoping to survive the rebuilding of its present long enough to ensure that it has a future. Street magician Jude Dubuisson is likewise burdened by his past and by the consequences of the storm, because he has a secret: the magical ability to find lost things, a gift passed down to him by the father he has never known—a father who just happens to be more than human.

Jude has been lying low since the storm, which caused so many things to be lost that it played havoc with his magic, and he is hiding from his own power, his divine former employer, and a debt owed to the Fortune god of New Orleans. But his six-year retirement ends abruptly when the Fortune god is murdered and Jude is drawn back into the world he tried so desperately to leave behind. A world full of magic, monsters, and miracles. A world where he must find out who is responsible for the Fortune god’s death, uncover the plot that threatens the city’s soul, and discover what his talent for lost things has always been trying to show him: what it means to be his father’s son.

My Review:

This is one of those “throw a bunch of books in a blender” things. In this particular case I’d be throwing American Gods, The Map of Moments, possibly some Nightside or Iron Druid or Eric Carter and any halfway decent guide to the Tarot, and I think I’d end up with something like The City of Lost Fortunes. As long as I included a tip of the hat to The Empire Strikes Back.

Not that it’s a bad blend by any means. Except for the necessity of the Tarot guidebook, I love all those stories. But that doesn’t mean that this one isn’t a bit derivative. But still eminently readable..

And I have a long running “thing” for books set in New Orleans. So there you go. Or here I am. Or there we are. All of the above.

This is a story about post-Katrina New Orleans, like The Map of Moments or Royal Street. And even though in this particular story Katrina is several years in the past, the breaking of the levees and the diaspora of its people is still a very present force in the city. Something was lost in the storm – something that still hasn’t come back. In spite of, or perhaps because of, all of the rebuilding.

Jude Dubuisson is the protagonist of this story. A hero he isn’t. Anti-hero is probably a lot closer to the mark – or at least that’s the role he grows into over the course of the story. At the beginning, Jude is mostly just a loser, scared of his own magic and trying to keep as low a profile as possible.

And it’s ironic that Jude begins as such a loser, because his gift, his magic, is his ability to find lost things. He can find the earrings you lost last week, the child who was kidnapped last month, or the soul that you signed away decades ago.

There’s someone on the supernatural side of New Orleans who needs Jude to find what the city has lost – before someone with less benign intentions finds that something and twists it to their own purposes.

Jude is supposed to play the game, and lose. He doesn’t even know what the rules are. By the time he figures out that the stakes are his soul, he’s already all the way in – and halfway back to the person he was meant to be.

The question is whether or not he has enough tricks up his sleeve to solve all the puzzles before the puzzles solve him. And just how much of a son of a Trickster he truly is.

Escape Rating B+: In the end, this story really got to me. Once Jude finally figures out what he really is and what he is meant to be, the final chapters are a wild ride that leads to a marvelously satisfying conclusion.

But the book still reminded me a bit too much of the stories that make up its gumbo flavor to stand up to an A grade – but it was close.

Although the feel of this book is that of a gritty urban fantasy, complete with snarky noir-ish detective, the ambience felt so much like American Gods, just writ on a slightly smaller scale – New Orleans instead of the entire American continent  But The City of Lost Fortunes is still a story of gods and monsters and hidden agendas and powerful beings that hide in plain sight and manipulate events to suit themselves.

There’s even a hidden Trickster pulling the strings behind the scenes, but unlike Low-Key Liesmith in American Gods, I recognized just who S. Mourning was from his first appearance.

Because this is New Orleans, in addition to the more usual pantheon of gods and monsters, the loa of Louisiana Voodoo play a big part of the story, both as guides to the perpetually perplexed (our “hero”) and as movers and shakers of events – even if some of their moving and shaking serves merely to upset other beings’ apple carts.

Jude Dubuisson is an interesting choice for a hero, or even an anti-hero. On the one hand, he certainly has a LOT of growing to do. He hasn’t been able to accept who and what he is, and has been kind of in hiding from himself since Katrina. I want to say he’s lost his mojo, but that really doesn’t cover it. It’s more like he deliberately threw his mojo away, and isn’t sure he ever wants it back. Once his choices are finally reduced to take it back and maybe get out of this mess in one piece or die AND lose his soul (these are not necessarily the same thing) he finally looks for what he himself has deliberately lost.

He also spends a significant part of the story lost in other meanings of the word lost. It is certainly a metaphor for his gift, but it is also the kind of lost that gives readers headaches. It’s not merely that he doesn’t know what he’s doing or why he’s doing it, but the reasons why it needs to be done or even what “it” is are obscured from both the protagonist and the reader.

In other words, Jude is confused for the longest time, and so are we. Following him as he grasps and gropes at what the problem is and whether or not he can find or trick his way into a solution is the story.

And in the end, it works. It really, really works. Sometimes a bowl of gumbo is exactly what you have a taste for – reading-wise or otherwise.

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