No Game for Knights

Dark visions, dystopias, and dictatorships fill the pages of this hard-boiled and entirely unsubtle anthology from Correia (Grimnoir Chronicles) and Ezell (The Psyche of War). It’s a man’s world in these 15 stories of detective heroes, all featuring “an honorable man doing his best to uncover the truth in a dishonorable world.” Tonally, however, the collection is all over the place. The game is afoot in the twisted standout murder mystery “The Hound of the Bastard’s Villa” by G. Scott Huggins, in which Grundy, a whatwolf (lower in intelligence than a werewolf), is found poisoned, leaving a human veterinarian, a gnome, and a dark elf to root out the assassin. In Michael F. Haspill’s gritty “Storm Surge” an immortal Egyptian pharaoh posing as a Miami detective enlists the help of a powerful little girl to dispatch ancient vampires. The heartfelt “Pandemonium” by Sharon Shinn follows a wayward Midwestern shape-shifter who helps a woman recover her kidnapped son from her abusive boyfriend. A trio of bumbling investigators attempt to recover a statuette of the goddess of assassins in D.J. Butler’s noir “The Lady in the Pit.” Though many of these high-octane yarns work individually, they form an erratic and disjointed whole. (Sept.)