The Soft Touch by Daniel Polanksky

Blurb:

Time passes

Kings fall

Low Town endures

Low Town is the worst slum in the Empire, where lives are sold on the penny. Once its heir apparent, Wren returns after fifteen years to a city in turmoil, the syndicates feuding and the city on the brink of rebellion. Drawn into a tangled web of intrigue and murder, Wren finds himself the pawn in a conspiracy threatening to drive the Empire to war.

But all is not as it seems. Because Wren was trained by the most brilliant crime lord that ever lived-and he's come back to Low Town to find him.

Review:

The Soft Touch is a hilariously grim novella with enough witty banter and ankle-breaking twists to offer a seditious welcome to the Low Town initiate or a secretive handshake to the returned. This was my first venture into Rigus and Low Town and, frankly, I had no idea what to expect. I was so pleasantly surprised to find exceptionally crisp prose and snappy dialogue bursting out of the pages at me. I was taken in within the first few pages by Wren’s clever battle of wits with the rambunctious and lovable Geraldine, who would certainly slit your throat for the right price. I had heard great things about the Low Town trilogy, but I was nervous that I would feel out of place without the background knowledge of the previous books. But rest assured, The Soft Touch is a fantastic place to begin. After the first chapter, I immediately bought the first book in the series (titled Low Town in the US and The Straight Razor Cure in the UK; it was confusing for me too at first, don’t you worry) because I knew I was going to want to read everything Polanksy wrote about this gritty town. And for those of you who have already read the original trilogy, my guess is this will provide an extremely interesting continuation of the Low Town saga, shedding some light on what happened to some of the key characters after She Who Waits.

“Violence betrays a lack of imagination,” he insisted. “And I’m a creative person.”

“I’m going to slit your throat and pull your tongue out the hole.”

“Again, unproductive.”

Again, without the context of the previous books, I don’t know if Wren is a new character, someone only mentioned in passing in the original trilogy, or a main character throughout. But The Soft Touch opens with Wren as our main character. A suave, dapper gentleman returning to Low Town with business to be won and an answer for every question. He appears to effortlessly glide between bloody, warring gangster families, pitting one against the other while he walks out the back, unharmed. When he does need to get his hands dirty, he dispatches his enemies with a surgeon’s efficiency. He quickly meets Geraldine, a dock rat who begins to work in his employ after he slickly maneuvers around some of the deadliest hooligans of Rigus. This novella is set up similar to a heist story, where it quickly becomes evident that Wren has returned to Low Town for a very specific reason and has spent a lot of time planning out all of his moves like a chess master. There were multiple points throughout the book that I felt like I was following Edmond Dantès from The Count of Monte Cristo as he meticulously pulled the strings necessary to enact his ultimate revenge. 

While the beginning of the book seemed fairly straight forward, the last third of the book threw out numerous twists and turns, fakes and jukes that kept me guessing until the very end. Even in the last pages, I expected a very different outcome. I’m really, really hoping that ending was actually the beginning of much more from Polansky in Low Town!

I have to say again, I loved Polansky’s writing style in The Soft Touch. I haven’t read his other works, so I don’t know if this is typical for how he writes or if this was something new he was trying out for this novella. But everything was so clean and fast paced. The way he described characters was perfect. This was one of my favorites: 

“Caraway was shorter than Katarina, who was not a tall woman. His uniform was spotless and unbecoming. He looked like a mortician or a tax accountant and seemed in a constant state of constipation. He was as adept a spymaster as anyone living, a stern conductor who didn’t mind making the occasional castrate if it kept the rest of the chorus in harmony.” 

None of this, “he was a rotund gentleman with brown hair that looked a little frumpy.” No, we’re getting: a stern conductor who didn’t mind making the occasional castrate if it kept the rest of the chorus in harmony. That’s bloody genius and freaking hilarious. As much as I loved the story and getting to know Wren and Geraldine and the other denizens of Low Town, I couldn’t get enough of HOW Polansky was telling the story. If you’re a fan of quick, snappy prose that just feels refreshing to read, look no further than The Soft Touch.

The last thing I’ll say is Low Town, and Rigus in particular, are terribly gruesome neighborhoods with derelict deviants populating them, forcing the overall atmosphere to be dark and overwhelming. But for as dreary of a place as Low Town is, Wren did a remarkable job shining a ray of hope and light through the smoke-smuggered stars. He was a protagonist who was hard not to cheer for, even after you step back and look at the death and destruction he left in his wake so that he could potentially set himself up to rule a crime syndicate of his own in the future. 

“Make everything better is a pretty ambitious goal.”

“Pity the soul who sets his dreams so low as to meet them in his lifetime.”

The Soft Touch made me an immediate fan of Daniel Polanksy. I will be visiting Low Town again in the very near future.