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The Case of the Dragon Slayer is a cross between a typical buddy story and a serial killer profile story. One of the world's seven Dragons has been killed. As these dragons are god-like beings of near infinite power, this changes everything.

The story follows the path of three people as they rush to discover not only who killed the dragon, but how. Two of the three are the aforementioned buddies: Major Heathrow Kristoff, the Wind Knight and thus the best fighter in the world and Edwarth Thizwerks Markwhistle, an Arbitrator from the powerful Seven Seas Alliance. The story is narrated by Captain Reize Risukasse who also serves as a subtle romantic interest for Kristoff.

The three of them travel the world to meet the people who were the last to see the dragon, trying to see if one of them was the killer and to learn of the nature of their visit. The meeting with each petitioner is played out as an episode fraught with its own difficulties and peril. At each, Markwhistle uses his Sherlock Holmes-like deductive reasoning to both deal with the reactions to their appearance and to assist in his determining what happened to the late Dragon.

The story manages to successfully play with a number of typical tropes for both the fantasy and detective genres, however, it did still end up with the heroine needing to be rescued at one point, even if he did manage do to that in a somewhat novel fashion.

The story telling was good and, as I mentioned, the plotting worked with plenty of clever twists. The dialogue was not as crisp as it felt like it wanted to be, however after you are half way through the cadence finds itself and, apparently insinuates itself into your subconscious.

 The book made an impression on me. The night after finishing this book, I had a dream where I was traveling with the characters. It wasn't really through any particular part of the story, but each of the main characters was present. I'm not sure if this is a positive or  a negative but it was not at all a bad dream.

John Enzinas reads frequently and passionately. In his spare time he plays with swords.