Sweet Silver Blues by Glen Cook, isn’t exactly hot off the presses. So why am I mentioning it now? Well, I just finished reading Cruel Zinc Melodies, and there never seems to be much point to me in blathering on about the umpteenth book in a series… either my readers will have read the earlier books and will already have a pretty good idea as to whether or not they are interested in this one, or they won’t have read the earlier books, and therefore should probably start at the beginning.
A Fantasy/Noir Detective cross set in what appears to be the New York of Heroic Fantasy (it’s perhaps no dirtier than Ankh Morpok, but certainly much grittier), this book follows the adventures of a grumpy ex-marine detective, and his vegetarian dark-elf assassin friend, gnomish clients, a variety of good looking dames (not all of them human), and more mysterious bad guys than you can shake a stick at. The style is noir (with a nice helping of humor), the dialog is witty, the minor characters are delightfully depicted, and the worldbuilding is deeper and more complex than it first appears.
The series it launches is officially called Garrett, P. I. But I was tickled once by a reference somewhere (Locus, perhaps?) to the “Adjective Metal Noun” series. I’ve lost count of how many books there are in it. Enough that Cook has started to look like he’s working pretty hard to find an appropriate metal. >:) Garrett ages, and the series gets progressively darker and more serious over time, but otherwise stays true to it’s concept: it’s magic and thugs and lovely ladies who are in deep trouble (or sometimes are the trouble) with a generous helping of fantasy races (and racists) all the way from silver to zinc.