Superhero Detective For Hire is a fast, cute read with some pleasing character development and nifty backstory and plot. Our hero detective Truman Lord appeared a few times in Darius Brasher’s other books Sentinels and Rogues, and I thought he was interesting enough to check out the full-length novel featuring his exploits.
Lord is a wise-cracking private detective who happens to be a superhero, able to do almost anything with water. He hides behind his smart aleck ladies man persona while actually smart and persistent. He makes fun of himself to himself, giving himself alliterative names such as Truman the Tenacious and asks random ladies whether they are dazzled by his good looks.
Truman Lord takes a case from a university president who is being blackmailed by her boy toy lover. Oops. The boy toy is a meta human too and can record anything from his perspective and put it to video. This skill serves him well when it comes to getting ladies to pay up. Lord takes the case and finds himself behind the eight ball with dead bodies piling up and a shortage of clues. Needless to say he manages to solve the mystery.
Superhero Detective for Hire is a fast read, easy to follow as Brasher takes care to tell us where we are and why, who the other people are and why we should care. For example, at the end we revisit a minor character we met earlier and Truman tells us just enough to jog our memory as to who this person is.
I liked Superhero Detective for Hire because it was funny and the super hero aspects were low key. (I really do not want to slog through pages someone’s powers.) Truman Lord doesn’t take himself or the whole superhero panoply seriously and the story is a lot of fun.
At the same time Brasher does a good job helping us get to know Truman. He is far more than a jokesmith – albeit one with good taste in clothes – and I will enjoy his exploits in future stories in this series.
4 Stars
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