American Magic: A Novel

I bought this a while back, and I didn't like it. It's an incredible concept. I was so psyched to finally get to dive into this fascinating story, and I was grossly disappointed. To sum up, great concept, nothing new done with it. I actually don't think there's a single twist, plot point, or character in this story that we haven't seen (at least in the broad strokes) dozens of times before. The main character, Zola, is an ex CIA agent who quit some years ago when his conscience couldn't take it any more, and tried to get his boss fired on the way out. Didn't work. The assistant directer of the CIA has convinced said boss that they need him on this one. This lasts just long enough for Zola to find out what's up (magic and stuff) and find a woman named Mack who will be the first member of his small team. Then the DIRECTOR of the FREAKING CIA literally decides that as long as Zola is locked up and miserable and unable to do anything except get tortured by his flunkies, everything is OK and right in the world. He never deviates from this position for even a second for the rest of the book. This provides justification for Zola to go rouge. Someone has to do something to actually solve the problem after all. Zola then gets help from a hacker friend of his (who's naturally more effective with his jury-rigged civilian tech operated by him alone than the entire CIA, no joke) and almost immediately finds someone who knows almost literally everything about magic, how it works and the people who have been secretly using it for thousands of years. I'll give the author some points back for making the expert less Deus ex machina as the plot proceeds and more secrets are discovered. And with what I've told you so far you could probably write the rest of the book from here and if you used the first genre specific tropes that came to mind you'd probably hit all the main points. So, to repeat, incredibly cool concept, literally nothing new done with it.