All of the characters from the first book return, including Max's old adventuring friends, a meddlesome captain of the guard, and the dragon itself, but there are a few new characters who make an appearance as well. The story continues to be a form of detective novel, but this time Max isn't trying to track down the perpetrator of a terrible crime, he's trying to find the body of an elf we saw being blasted over a balcony by a shotgun at the end of the first book.
Continuing the combination of more typical fantasy novels (with elves, dwarves, halflings, goblins, humans, and magic) with a much more noir feeling (Max carries both a wand and a shotgun for example), the book picks up just a few days after the conclusion of the previous story. After very much enjoying the first book in the Shotguns & Sorcery series, Hard Times in Dragon City, I was very much looking forward to reading about the continuing adventures of Max Gibson and his friends in the second.