Tales from Dragon Precinct (DeCandido)

Tales from Dragon Precinct , Keith R. A. DeCandido (2013)

Not really a review, just reminding myself about some of the details of what I read ...

To date, I have read all the Dragon Precinct novels which have been published. I have not read all the stories. As I discovered in a sit-down at Heliosphere (NY) this past spring, Keith has submitted a number of Precinct stories to various anthologies that ask him for stories. Some of those are collected in this volume. Not all, obviously, because it was printed in 2013.

The better stories are the ones that remind me of Barney Miller episodes, even if I don't try to see specific analogues. The only downside was that the "first meeting" story, which concludes the book, was published in one of the actual Precinct books -- or at least in the edition that I purchased. (People who bought it "back in the day" might not have seen it.) The other amusing thing -- and this isn't a criticism, but a hazard of having submitting stories to many outlets -- is that I recognized when DeCandido reused a passage about calling the resident wizard to crime scene. A quibble.

None of these stories are "required reading" to enjoy the novels, but they fill in the gaps. The other books sometimes reference past cases, and some of those are in this book. The funny thing is that some of them were written after of a reference in a novel, not before them.

Fun book. Fills the long gap until either the Phoenix or Manticore books are written. And now I'll have to get More Tales.

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