Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Warning: This review is long and contains spoilers for both Demon Moon and some Dresden Files books. After reading a ton of the Dresden Files I decided to take a break from the series and see how other authors do paranormal detectives as this is a genre that I feel has great potential. So after plumbing the depths of goodreads, I settled on book one of the Professor Croft series. I was really excited at the start. It's a contemporary series, the cover art looks phenomenal, and I was eager to start a new adventure, in a new city, with a new protagonist as he juggles his duties as a college professor with his night time escapades as a paranormal investigator. It didn't take long before I started noticing similarities between Everson Croft, and the Dresden Files. After the first 18 pages, we learn that Croft is affiliated with a secret order of wizards that he is not on good terms with because of a past incident. This past incident also caused him to be marked or indebted to a supernatural entity which is a burden to him and interferes with his work. Any person who has read the Dresden Files will recognize this as sounding very similar to that book's protagonist Harry Dresden. I did my best to give Demon Moon a chance after this point. After all tropes are very common in urban fantasy and fiction in general. Harry Potter, Harry Dresden, and John Constantine begin their stories with a tragic past which left them marked in some way. But the slack I gave the book was quickly turned into a noose for Everson Croft to hang himself. Further character traits that Croft shares with Dresden are both characters employ a staff, sword cane, and revolver. Both characters own overweight cats and have a spirit roommate. Dresden owns a 30lb cat named Mister who is routinely possessed by his live in air spirit "Bob" while Croft owns a 40lb tabby named Tabitha who is permanently possessed by a succubus spirit. Both characters have a resident "jerk" making their lives difficult. Morgan for Harry, Prof Snodgrass for Croft. Both characters own a 3D model of the city where they live which serve to track magical disturbances, and both characters have a grizzled mentor who was at one point or another tasked with executing the protagonist should he defy the will of the White Council/Oracular Order of Magi and Magical Beings. Oh and finally at the end of Demon Moon Croft becomes...wait for it...a consultant for the NYPD's Special Investigations unit and reports to a female detective. The copying isn't limited to character traits but world mechanics as well. Demons killed erupt into ectoplasm which quickly evaporates. Water disrupts the casting of spells, Ley Lines exist in the world, wizards and technology don't mix, ghosts are the echos of the departed, and thresholds block uninvited magical entities and cripple the power of mortal wizards. All these similarities wouldn't be an issue individually. For instance, the concept of thresholds isn't a new world mechanic in occult fiction (see "must be invited" on TV tropes for examples). Croft owning an overweight cat and using a revolver doesn't necessarily make him a copy of Harry Dresden. But when the similarities appear one after another and to this level, they become impossible to ignore. Because of this, Demon Moon reads in many parts of the book like an unfinished Dresden Files draft with the proper nouns changed. If character traits and world mechanics weren't bad enough, Demon Moon's issues with originality bleed over into the plot of the book as well. Croft is investigating both the summonings of lesser demons throughout the city and the murder of a church rector. During his investigation he catches the ire of Arnaud Thorne the city's resident corrupt business man and vampire. Thorne is essentially what the baby of Dresden characters Bianca and Johnny Marcone would look like. During Croft's meeting with Thorne, Croft is forced to defend himself with a magical ring which is an heirloom of his grandfather. This situation feels almost identical to Dresden's meeting with Bianca in Storm Front where he is forced to defend himself with his pentagram amulet which was an heirloom of his mother. Later in the book, Croft is forced to defeat two demons at his apartment while protecting a female student. The female student came to Croft's apartment to seduce him due to an infatuation caused by side effects she experiences after being exposed to Ley energy that conveniently accumulates when a wizard tells a story to a captive audience. *eye roll. Again we have a scene ripped from the pages of Storm Front. Harry Dresden fought a demon at his apartment while defending a woman who was trying to seduce him due to her being under the influence of an accidentally consumed love potion. When Demon Moon actually breaks original ground, the attempt is not encouraging. The scenes where Croft is teaching do a good job at realistically unloading exposition. However it's clear Croft only views his teaching career as a means of keeping a roof over his head. This is demonstrated in his inability to show up to class which forces another professor to repeatedly cover for him, coming to class unprepared, and the sardonic opinions he shares with the reader about his students. While maintaining a cover life is difficult and characters who try often miss out on engagements or show up late to work, these characters are able to keep their covers by loving what they do and being exceptional at their jobs. Clark Kent was a good journalist, Peter Parker was a good photographer while Croft only stays employed because the Order funnels money into the college in the form of bogus grants when the Order could just give him a salary. Nobody wants to read about a protagonist who's apathetic toward, and terrible at his job. The ending is nothing more than a series of conveniences that allow Croft to beat an opponent several times stronger than himself. In similar fashion to his cover profession Croft is not a powerful or even good wizard, and succeeds only because of luck. Not a great start for the first book in the series. In closing, even without reading his other books in the series, it's very clear to me Magnarella was going for quantity over quality with Professor Croft. In the same time Jim Butcher released book two of the Dresden Files, Magnarella released 4 books of the Professor Croft series. That's the difference in time between creating something from scratch versus copying the frame work of an already established series. Sixty to seventy percent of Demon Moon's inner workings feel like they've been reverse engineered from the Dresden Files. All the bits that are original feel hastily constructed and lazily implemented. Do yourself a favor and pass on this lazily written, blatant copy-cat of a series.