The Man with the Golden Torc

Executive Summary: Overall I'm pretty underwhelmed. I was hoping for something to take the place of Mr. Green's Nightside series, but this just didn't do it for me.Audio book: This is the first book I've listened to by Stuart Blinder. I thought he was pretty good. He does several voices and accents that helped move along what could often be a rather slow plot.Full ReviewA friend of mine introduced me to Simon R. Green with his Nightside series a few years back. I didn't read a lot back then, but I would generally pick up the new one he had out every year. I rated them all 3 star books save for [b:A Hard Day's Knight 8288919 A Hard Day's Knight (Nightside, #11) Simon R. Green https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1279637066s/8288919.jpg 13137384], which I really liked. However, they were short and mostly fun reads that didn't require much thought. Mind Candy.The protagonist of this series makes a cameo at the end of that one, so I've always been meaning to check this out as a possible replacement. I got a good deal on it from audible, and I needed something to fill about a week or so of audio so it seemed the perfect time.Like Nightside this is another Urban Fantasy series. However instead of a detective protagonist, this one has a “secret agent” as the lead. James Bond, but with mostly magical gadgets rather than technological ones. In fact his cover name is Shaman Bond.The book titles of this series are all parodies of Bond titles. Mr. Green always likes to poke fun at tropes in his writing. With this one he's mocking both spy novels and fantasy tropes by combining the two.I'm not sure if the book just isn't as good, or if my tastes have changed as I've become a more voracious reader the past few years. The humor was still good, the plot was light. It just wasn't working for me.It felt too long. My recollection was that most of the Nightside books were ~250 pages each, while this is closer to 400 I believe. It's over 17 hours in audio. That's probably at least 5 hours too long.There were too many dead-ends in the story. I recall Mr. Green writing scenes in Nightside that seemed unimportant to the plot but that explore some bizarre idea he must have had. This book has entirely too much of that. I think if a few of them had been cut out/saved for later books this might have been a better story.It's possible these books get better as they go along. There were parts I enjoyed, and the ending was pretty good to bump it from a 2.5 to a solid 3, but I'm not likely to continue on at this point.