I just finished reading One Man, by Harry Connolly.
This is really good pulp fantasy.
It starts off slow, unfortunately, with multiple layers of flashbacks that annoyed me at first. But once the plot gets rolling, it doesn’t let up, and it turns into the kind of story that I can’t help but love. The tangled secrets, conspiracies, different people completely misunderstanding what’s going on, the worldbuilding, it’s all fantastic.
It’s also super dark and super tragic and really kind of fucked up, and honestly I don’t know if I’m fully recovered from that ending. This book is kind of a generic action plot–unknown stranger with mysterious powers and super murder abilities gets involved in a complicated crime-and-politics situation in order to save a little girl he has no real connection with other than being friendly towards her–but goddamn if it doesn’t work. Connolly’s Broken Man is the perfect world-weary butcher protagonist, carrying the weight of his sins on his back and making the worst villains in the city pay for their own. The detectives trying to track him down are, in turn, fully-realized characters with plans and plots of their own, as are the lords in the estates above the city, the little girl in danger, the gangsters endangering her, the mysterious foreign bodyguard, all of them.
I’ll say it again–this book was really good. I picked it up on an absolute whim because I liked the action-movie-style description on the back of the book, and I was expecting pulp fantasy violence and nothing else. Well, I got that, in spades, but I also got a ton of really subtle and clever worldbuilding that I wasn’t expecting at all, characters that I genuinely cared about, and a healthy dose of tragedy and horror to mix things up a bit. One Man is at its core a generic B-movie plot, yes, but it’s so well done that honestly I can’t call it a B-movie type of book. This is some John Wick type shit, right here, and I love it.
I’m going to have to look up more of Connolly’s work, I think.
EDIT: A while after writing this review, I watched The Man From Nowhere on one of my regular action-movie-and-takeout relaxation nights, and discovered that the plot of One Man is literally just The Man From Nowhere with some fantasy twists to it. Like…it’s actually beat-for-beat the same plot. One Man was still a hell of a lot of fun, but you should probably know that it’s…ah…extremely derivative.