This is so very, very different from Howard's Johannes Cabal work that I was rather disappointed. There was none of that distinctive narrative voice that makes Cabal such a delight, to the point that I was wondering whether it was indeed the same author. By publication date, he'd already written quite a few Cabal books by the time this one came out, and I can understand why he might have wanted to explore other styles, but this lacked the magic of Cabal. Hard-boiled police procedural--even with just a bit of self-awareness of tropes--doesn't thrill me the way Cabal did. Also, his trope-awareness of police procedural detective stories didn't seem to extend to the rather knee-jerk 'cops are good guys' narrative perspective so common among that genre. I'd like to think that, if Howard were writing it today, he might have been a bit more critical. But after I let that go (and got used to the narrator, who isn't so great in this audiobook), I found myself having a rather good time. It's a pretty run-of-the-mill Lovecraftian horror thriller that kept me entertained if not charmed. And I'm quite enjoying the sequel, which is doing very clever things with setting.