It’s always a risky move for a reviewer to try their hand at the craft they critique. If their work doesn’t live up to their own standards of quality, they may lose some of their audience. Daniel Greene has taken a risk with the publication of Breach of Peace. So the question is… Does it pay off?
The story opens with a macabre crime scene described in bloody, gristly detail. A family has been murdered and it’s up to Inspector Khlid to get to the bottom of it. She’s helped by her husband and fellow Inspector, Samuel, and the star of the Seventh Precinct, Chapman. The dynamic between these three core characters is one of the highlights of the story.
Sam and Khlid are happily married and seem to do an admirable job trying to keep their professional and domestic lives separate, and Chapman is a gets-shit-done asshole with the emotional intelligence of a brick. Taken together, the clash of colorful personalities accomplishes a lot in the brief number of pages we get to spend with the Inspectors.
If I had to be picky, I wish that we’d either gotten more time inside the heads of Sam and Chapman. We do get a brief, brilliant passage from Chapman’s point of view, but it feels out of place in a story almost entirely told from Khlid’s eyes.
Breach of Peace will feel like coming home for fans of Brian McClellan, Brandon Sanderson, and Joe Abercrombie. I imagine it’s what you’d get if the lovechild of McClellan’s Promise of Blood and Sanderson’s Elantris had to spend an hour in Glokta’s torture chamber.
With that said, there were some aspects of the novella that didn’t quite work for me. This is a world where in which the characters are all police working directly for God.
Now, children didn’t grow up wishing to be soldiers, but officers… Since their founding, The Capitol Police had been a force for good in the community. Those who had been among the first to join were all heralded as local heroes.
Yes, this is a fantasy world. But most of us reading this novella live in a world where glorifying cops comes with quite a bit of baggage. There’s also an uncomfortable attitude of “violence solves problems” in how the book talks about the interactions between police and civilians.
In a pinch, police could usually count on help from armed bystanders…
I’ve never been a fan of the mentality that the best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Again, this is fantasy—and edging toward the grimdark side of the genre at that. But this line took me out of the story and made me question it’s inclusion.
Disobeying an officer of God during a raid was punishable by death. Khlid pulled her trigger.
Putting me into the perspective of a cop who shoots people in a surprise raid is not what I was expecting in this fantasy story. Again, it’s hard not to draw real-world parallels here in a genre considered by many to be a temporary escape from reality.
From a craft angle, Greene balances action scenes, quiet character moments, and vivid description with ease. I can typically determine an author’s strengths pretty quickly, but I thought all of these aspects were handled well. There’s a recurring use of foreshadowing at the end of key scenes to hint at the direction the plot will take that kept me at the edge of my seat while reading. And though this is shorter than a full novel, it captured me attention enough to finish in one sitting, which for various reasons has only happened a handful of times in the last year.
Breach of Peace also takes hold of a few tried and true tropes from heroic fantasy and twists them into something beautifully horrific. I’d say more, but I’d rather you be traumatized like I was.
And finally, the closing chapter leads rather nicely into where I’m assuming the next novella will begin. It’s compelling, emotional, and sets the tone for the world and the story to come.
There’s a ton of hype surrounding Breach of Peace. Hell, it was an Amazon bestseller hours after the preorder went live. So, does this risky novella pay off?
Let’s just say that I think this book only improves Daniel Greene’s standing as a critic, and if you discovered his work through a shared love of writers like Brandon Sanderson, I doubt you’ll be disappointed.
You can also check out our podcast chat with Daniel Greene here, where we discuss Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames and The Last Sun by K.D. Edwards.
I received an advanced review copy of this novella in exchange for a fair and honest review.
