Highfire by Eoin Colfer

I never know how to write about books that I found perfectly fine but didn't really love. You know how sometimes you find that you have to force yourself to go back to a book, telling yourself things like "it's fun to read, isn't it? You like that element, and the narrative is zippy, and you can finish it quickly, so why don't you want to get back into it?"

Highfire was like that for me: good at what it does, energetic and colorful and specific, set in an interesting place with quirky characters, but I just want to pick at the narrative voice and how it organizes the story in ways that I'm not as fond of.

(To be blunt: there are three major characters here, and I think, in the back of my head, I really wanted the multiple-first-person narration version of the story, to get deeper into the characters. Instead, this is told in an omniscient third-person that has quirks of language and seems to have a viewpoint, but stays a voice rather than becoming a person. It's also a breezy, somewhat surface-y voice - great for the story being told, but not quite what I was looking for.)

Those are all Me Problems. I'll try to sidestep them as much as possible.

Highfire is billed as an adult fantasy novel: it's written by Eoin Colfer, best-known for the YA "Artemis Fowl" series. I found that it had elements that might keep it - in my memory, realizing that I've been out of SFF publishing for sixteen years now - from being published as YA, but it centers on a teen protagonist and the tone and style had a YA flavor to me.

The three main characters are:

• Everett "Squib" Moreau, a fifteen-year-old guy living in a small Louisiana swamp town, without a whole lot of distinctive characteristics. He's fairly smart but not interested in school, he has one close friend who is mentioned a lot but never appears on the page, he's talky but Colfer doesn't let him spin yarns. He's the reader stand-in, I guess: a normal guy at the middle of weirdness.
• Regence Hooke is the villain, a deeply corrupt, probably sociopathic local constable who wants to get with Squib's still-hot nurse mother Elodie, wants to supplant his mobster semi-boss, Ivory Conti, and somewhat wants to get rid of Squib as well. He's bad news in every possible way, smarter and nastier and better-prepared than his type often is.
• "Vern," a three-thousand-year-old dragon whose real name is Wyvern, Lord Highfire. He's possibly the last of his kind, living quietly in a shack way out in the swamp, with a local quirky character - Waxman, who is another variety of mythological being - as his only point of contact with the human world. He's a "dragon," but Colfer presents him as roughly human-sized and shaped, able to use normal furniture and wear normal clothes. (I never got a good mental image of what he actually looks like, or how his wings work, or anything like that.) His overwhelming desire is to stay below the radar, to keep humans from knowing about him, and to just keep on - and he's entirely happy to barbecue or otherwise vanish anything and anyone that threatens that.

The action kicks off when Squib semi-accidentally witnesses Hooke murdering someone for Conti, one late night way out in the swamp, and then flees right into Vern's lap. Squib manages to convince Vern not to kill him, and eventually becomes Vern's new go-between to the human world. But Hooke is still out there, and knows someone witnessed the murder. And Hooke has other plots that intersect Squib's world, most notably his pursuit of Elodie.

Action setpieces pop up every sixty to eighty pages, mostly with Vern breathing dragonfire and/or flying to destroy things. Squib gets battered nearly as much as a Tim Powers protagonist. Hooke is sneaky and tricky and full of plans and has access to all manner of exciting and exotic weaponry, but never quite feels evil for some reason.

There is a happy ending, as there has to be. Along the way, lots of things blow up real good, there's a surprisingly large body count that Colfer mostly mentions in passing, and only fairly small bits of New Orleans get trashed by a dragon. It didn't quite grab me the way I was hoping it would, but it's fun and pretty much exactly what it's billed as: a kick-ass dragon/crime story in the modern world, by a hugely bestselling YA writer.