Review - Office of the Lost by J. Scott Coatsworth & Kim Fielding
Office of the Lost
by J. Scott Coatsworth, Kim Fielding
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Volume 1 of Chaos and Order
Tags: Fantasy
Posted in Book Reviews on February 1, 2026
Crispin is a fae with a rather boring office job. He is a curator in the Office of the Lost. His supervisor sends Crispin out to retrieve things, which he brings back to the office, fills out lots of paperwork, and the items get filed away in the office’s vast archives. It’s a very mundane job, but Crispin, who likes order, is very good at it. One day, Crispin is tasked with collecting another item. Only, this time it’s a person, a human from Earth named Leopold. Leopold barely gets by in his run-down Sacramento apartment. Any job he gets rarely lasts for more than a few weeks before some freak accident or disaster means he has to move on. When Crispin comes to collect Leopold, things don’t go as planned, and the pair are catapulted from one world to another.
“Office of the Lost” is set in a recognizable fantasy universe where faeries, wizards, giants, and many other assorted creatures are real and living in different but connected worlds. Within that familiar universe, the authors have created a quirky story that’s full of surprises. The basic plot could be described as a sort of road trip buddy story, where two men who are almost polar opposites personality-wise are thrown together and come to like each other. This is fundamentally a romance, so there’s little doubt about where Leopold and Crispin will end up, but there are a lot of twists along the way.
The point of view alternates between Crispin and Leopold from one chapter to the next. I take it the two characters were each written by one of the authors, so we get a slightly different style as part of our view into each character’s personality. Crispin is a creature of habit. He likes things done right, and in a certain way. The term ‘OCD’ gets used in reference to the faery, but I don’t think Crispin displays the level of neurosis that the term usually implies.
Unlike Crispin, Leopold tolerates and even enjoys at least a little disorder. He may be a slob, but Leopold is a very likable slob. There are lots of clues about who, or what, Leopold really is throughout the story, so it’s not a big surprise when the truth is revealed. When Crispin’s own truth is disclosed much later, it’s more of a surprise but it makes perfect sense in light of what we’ve already learned about Leopold.
“Office of the Lost” is available from Smashwords or see Bookshop.org to find an independent bookstore to purchase from.
