Hard Day’s Knight – Another one that I’m undecided on.

Hard Day’s Knight (Black Knight Chronicles, #1) by John G. Hartness.
My rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ out of 5 stars.

Batman meets The Odd Couple meets Dracula in this award-winning horror comedy series!

Children are missing.

The police are stumped.

Halloween is coming, with an ancient evil on the horizon.

The vampires are the good guys.

This is not your ordinary fall weekend in Charlotte, NC. Vampire private detectives Jimmy Black and Greg Knightwood have been hired to keep a young client from being cursed for all eternity, but end up in a bigger mess than they ever imagined.

Suddenly trapped in the middle of a serial kidnapping case, Jimmy and Greg uncover a plot to bring forth an ancient evil into the world, and enlist the help of a police detective, a priest, a witch, a fallen angel and strip club proprietor to save the world. This unlikely band of heroes battles zombies, witches, neuroses and sunburn while cracking jokes and looking for the perfect bag of O-negative.

This is another one of those books where I cannot make up my mind if I really thought it was a worthwhile read or not. I have read several books from this author and I have liked some of them very much. Then some of them I didn’t really like that much.

This book is somewhat different from the above mentioned book. I get the feeling that it might be targeted for a slightly younger audience but I still would not classify it as a young adult book.

However, the book blurb is rather overselling the book. “Batman meets the odd couple meets Dracula”. Well I certainly didn’t found any Batman nor Any Dracula in her. Batman and Dracula are both competent characters each kicking ass in their own way. The characters in this book, especially the main protagonist, are mostly stumbling their way through the book. The phrase “amateur hour” comes to mind.

I think this is the main reason that I am on the fence for this book. This fumbling around is somewhat annoying. I mean come on, a vampire that cannot get out some simple handcuffs? It is a shame since he is otherwise a likable character and so is his witch friend.

I also like this cop that is introduced into the story. Quite frankly she seems to be a lot more competent overall than the main protagonist(s) even though she is just a mundane. The are quite a bunch of other characters in the book and overall they are mostly quite okay each adding some flavor and color to the story.

The dialogue is okay, nothing more nothing less. I’m not sure why Amazon promotes the book series as a “award winning horror comedy series” though. Smells like marketing bullshit to me. At least this first book is neither horror nor comedy. It is urban fantasy that comes with the usual amount of snarky comments, nothing else. Also, this first book is not exactly award winning material, certainly not any meaningful awards.

The story is not bad. It moves along in a adequate pace. As being the first book in the series there are of course a bunch of world building and “setting up” and the story is perhaps more a way to achieve this.

Overall, I think the book shows some promise, it is well written and the characters are not bad but the book as whole is not exactly wow material either. I especially dislike that the main protagonist is mostly fumbling around and doesn’t seem to be very competent.

I will have a go at the second book in the series though and hopefully that one will show some improvements.