Book Review: Time God Warlock, by Shami Stovall
The Chronos Chronicles Book 4
Time-Marked Warlock, the first novel starring Adair Finch, was a solid murder mystery with Adair Finch, “Warlock for Hire” (yes, with the capital letters.)
The follow-up, Chronos Warlock, was a complex, almost convoluted sequel that Raymond Chandler would have loved, with multiple murders, connecting to several different crimes—some of which were unrelated.
Book three, 24-Hour Warlock, was almost straightforward in comparison.
Today, we’re going to do the most unfair thing to a book that I can imagine.
I’m going to do a side-by-side comparison with the next nearest competitor.
Today’s review is for book #4 of Shami Stovall’s The Chronos Chronicles, immediately after reviewing The Dresden Files #18.
The Story
At the end of the last book, Adair Finch, Warlock PI, had two tasks to complete. As a debt to his patron Chronos, Adair had to babysit an egg with a fetal “deity” inside. Anything happens to the egg, Chronos will personally kill Adair.
The more difficult task: take the former spirit Kull, now inhabiting a human body, on a “practice date.” Kull wanted to know “what it was like to go out with a normal and stable individual,” and she picked him, which tells you what her judgement is like.
Time God Warlock opens with the practice date, and, in a tone consistent with the Urban Fantasy genre, the date is broken up by a crazed magical bounty hunter screaming about “an egg.” Chronos’ egg.
Since Adair has a missing persons case up in Tahoe, leaving Los Angeles seems like a good idea. This leaves Kull, Adair, and his ex-cop / werewolf assistant Enzo on a bus to Tahoe. And Tahoe is supernatural hotspot filled with skinwalkers, cults, and spirits that hunt people for sport. When the first thing that happens is that they get jumped by a werewolf, the missing person’s case takes a turn sideways.
Worst of all for Adair is that every time he resets time, he’s being stalked by Aeon, a different and competing god of time, who also wants the egg. After all, this is the spawn of Chronos, and Greek mythology told us how Chronos treated his children.
And good luck getting into the woods and out alive.
In one of the “how to” books for writing mysteries, the author compared Hercule Poirot mysteries to finding one’s way through a maze, and Mike Hammer novels were more like bashing through a series of walls. To stretch the analogy to the breaking point, Harry Dresden books are more like getting into a fistfight with a series of larger and thicker walls, until Dresden can escape it or learn to set brick on fire. With Adair Finch, it’s more like coming up against a wall, then starting over until there’s a way over, around, under, or through it … until he hits a bigger wall. And oh boy, are there a lot of brick walls in this one. It makes The Chronos Chronicles an interesting collection of puzzles to read through, with some additional character-driven parts along the way.
In fact, it’s so much so that another major difference between the two series will be in the character section.
One of the nice things with the Adair Finch series is that we never know what we’re going to get. So far, we’ve had two murder mysteries, a hit on a warlock, and now a missing person’s case complicated by a hunter stalking our heroes. With the cliffhanger of Time God Warlock, I’m not sure if that means the next book will be one long run and gun sequence, or what we’re going to get. Stovall keeps changing up the formula and I’m here for it.
Also in Time God Warlock, along the way, Shami Stovall gets to make fun of romance tropes (Kull has seen every romance movie in existence). Kull is odd, since Adair and Enzo are in a Mike Hammer novel, and she’s Katherine Hepburn in Bringing up Baby, only far more tolerable.
Adair also has a duel set of guns that would have world great in the Devil May Cry series.
Thankfully, Shami Stovall seems to have put a cap on the used of the word “quipped” as a dialogue tag. I got quiplash in the first book. (It really feels like nails on a blackboard, only scratching on my gray matter. No, don’t ask me why.)
Time God Warlock is another solid entry in a series that just likes to take the premise and play with it. And I look forward to book five. And yes, we’re set up for book five.
The Characters
A major difference between Adair Finch and Harry Dresden is that Harry gets beaten up a lot over the course of the novels. Sure, Dresden has had previous trauma, but the hits just keep on coming.
For Adair Finch, life beat the crap out of him a decade before book one, and each book works on dragging him further into joining the rest of the human race, whether he likes it or not. Harry Dresden in Twelve Months had a huge cast of established characters trying to pull him out of his cave. Adair Finch is attracting a similar, smaller cast, slowly, over time, whether he likes it or not. He has an apprentice of sorts to mentor, he’s dealing with personal business, and he has a few more deals to complete. Also, in this one, Adair is trying his hardest to not kill someone. In fact, there is an argument to be made that this one factor is why the book happens.
Speaking of the cast of characters, there is Kull, aka Samantha, aka the influencer Fox-Pistol. Luckily, the mischief spirit picked a highly-paid influencer / hot redhead, so no one in society really notices when she doesn’t act like a civilized human being, or just comes off as an absolute weirdo. If we were going to do Pygmalion in 2026, trying to teach an influencer how to be a real girl sounds pretty on point. Lucky for her, Kull comes with a staff to help cultivate her image so she doesn’t come off as any more deranged as anyone else on the internet. She is also surprisingly observant when one least expects it.
Enzo is interesting, since he’s a werewolf trying to tame himself. He’s one part Mike Hammer, one part Bill Bixby’s Incredible Hulk. He’s still a detective no matter what’s happened to him. He also has a cat named Methusepaws. No, please don’t ask me to pronounce it.
Aeon is an interesting antagonist, since we’re not entirely certain what drives him. He may not be evil. But as a “god,” he’s still a fickle and arbitrary sociopath. At the end of the day, he may still shiv … everyone… on a whim.
The World
One of the nice things with Time God Warlock is that the mythos is expanded upon. We’re going into an environment outside of LA, where the wilder things are. Stovall expands on Chronos from Greek Myth after being in Hell.
Then she brings in a Lovecraftian horror to top it all off.
Overall, the world building is nice an easy, without jamming mythology down the reader’s throat.
Politics
Unless you count making fun of influencers, there is no politics here.
Content Warning
At most, it’s PG-13. But yikes, does Kull have a lot of inappropriate dialogue.
Who is it for?
If you like Jim Butcher or Daniel Humphreys, but wish the series had just a little bit more of a puzzle to be worked out, I think you’ll enjoy The Chronos Chronicles.
Why buy it?
It’s an urban fantasy that’s very much like Jim Butcher or Daniel Humphreys, with just as many explosions, and with more of puzzles to be worked out. It really is just that good.
Come to think of it, Shami Stovall has been nominated for the Dragon Awards a few times, but never won. We should fix that. I have to remember to nominate this for the Dragons.