#227 Mike Resnick: Stalking the Unicorn

[bellinghman]

Mike Resnick: Stalking the Unicorn

Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: Legend paperbacks (1 Jan 2000)
ISBN-10: 0099510707
ISBN-13: 978-0099510703
Category(ies): Fantasy

It's New Year's Eve, and Manhattan private detective Mallory is down on his luck, low on money, and cursing his ex-partner who has run off with his wife. But life is going to get complicated, because a green elf pops up in his office, and tries to hire him to find a unicorn.

Naturally, Mallory takes a bit to be convinced. An elf has got to be some sort of weird joke, yes? But eventually, he agrees to follow the not particularly likeable, but at least paying, elf into an alternate Manhattan, one populated by strange creatures including leprechauns and the Grundy, the local incarnation of evil and chaos. There, he uses his skills to try to find the lost unicorn that the elf had been appointed to guard, and he has till dawn to do so.

This is a charming tale, full of wit and invention. It's very New York, not giving a wider view of either world, but that's fine - there's enough strangeness in this other New York to entertain, and the story develops niely, with motives and secrets being uncovered gently, but steadily until both Mallory and the reader wonder how they didn't see the obvious from the start. Recommended.