Low Town

June 6, 2011
Polansky hits all the right notes in his intelligent first novel, a blend of dystopian fantasy and hard-boiled crime. Rigus, one of the cities of the Thirteen Lands, is slowly rebuilding after war and plague have decimated the area's population. Fate has reduced the man known as the Warden, a former investigator for Black House, the Crown's secret police, to dealing pixie's breath and other narcotics. He lives on the edge of imminent demise, in conflict with other dealers and pursued by the law. When the Warden discovers a murdered child in the alley of a squalid Rigus slum called Low Town, he must rely on his old expertise to find the girl's killer. After a second and third child are slain, he realizes that it will take all of his guile and skill to survive the investigation, let alone discover what just might be an otherworldly predator at work. Sharp, noir-tinged dialogue and astute insights into class struggle mark Polansky as a writer with a future.

July 1, 2011

In Polansky's dark, moody debut novel, there's no sun, no joy, and staying alive for another day is about the only reason to rejoice; the grim setting makes for an interesting tale about a man with a past.

Warden, who grew up on the hardscrabble streets of Low Town, survived odds that would have killed lesser men. As a child, he watched his parents succumb to the Red Plague, which killed most of the adults in the city. Only a fortuitous encounter with his mentor, the Crane, saved him and the waif, Celia, whom Warden rescued from a terrible and sordid fate on the lawless, plague-ridden streets. As a very young and foolish man, Warden marched off to war and saw his men slaughtered, but he also witnessed something else, something beastly and obviously not from his world. The former law-enforcement officer turned drug dealer suspects his past could be catching up to him when innocent children begin to disappear and old comrades from his agent days exhibit a newfound interest in him. Polansky's fantasy world eschews beauty and reason: Low Town and its inhabitants take their inspiration from a combination of the Middle Ages and modern drug trafficking. The streets of Low Town are dirty, corrupt and filled with drug users, although with the grim lives they lead their habits are understandable. Warden, an antihero with no immediately apparent redeeming qualities, becomes a reluctant crusader whose capacity for violence is underestimated by both his enemies and friends alike. The author has constructed a believable alternate world, but it's a brutal one, where a short, miserable life is almost a given, and using the toilet means tossing the contents of a bedpan out of a window. He introduces a large cast of characters, while creating a plausible back story that draws them all together. The only place the tale fails is in the denouement, when the motivations of the antagonists come off as muddy and unclear.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

March 1, 2011

Low Town is exactly as it sounds, a scummy place collecting the dregs of the Thirteen Lands and run by a former agent with Black House (the secret police) who's fallen from grace. Now he deals drugs and dispenses violence, but a child's murder gives him pause--and forces him into an uneasy game with both Black House and the underground bosses. Noir fantasy, indeed, with a reading group guide, lots of promotion to mystery, thriller, and fantasy sites, and five foreign rights sales so far.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2011
Orphaned by the plague, Warden raised himself on the very mean streets of roiling, crumbling Low Town. Surviving the Great War, he became an agent of Black House, the dreaded secret police. Now a drug dealer and addict, he finds the body of a horrifically murdered little girl and steels himself to hunt down the murderer. The investigation draws him back into the world he abandoned. As he presses his search, his chances of survival drop precipitously. First novelist Polansky's Warden is a linear descendant of Philip Marlowe, a loner whose personal code requires that he see his quest through, living in a milieu of plagues, sorcerers, and trench wars fought with swords and crossbows. The magicians and sorcerers may scare off some hard-boiled crime fans. Their mistake, for the tale's setting is a wonderfully imagined cauldron of crime, made more engaging by Warden's world-weary, cynical commentary, hinting of a world much like our own. Low Town is a fine debut, and readers will want to see what Polansky does for an encore.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)