bibliogramma | Smoke gets in your mind

Smoke and Shadows by Tanya Huff

I've been a Tanya Huff fan for longer than she's been published. See, I used to know a guy who knew her well, and had been granted the great honour of reading her first novel prior to publication. He raved about it. And I knew him to be a man of good and discerning taste, so when that first novel was published, I went out and bought it right away. And the next one, and the one after that.

Huff may be best known for her "Victory Nelson" series - five novels about a former Toronto cop, now private detective with night blindness, a helpful ex-partner from the force, and a complicated relationship with the vampire bastard son of Henry VIII, who now writes bodice-rippers for a living.

Smoke and Shadows is the first novel in a stand-alone spin-off series from the Victory Nelson novels. Vicky's vampire, Henry Fitzroy, is now living in Vancouver, as is Tony Foster, a friend and sometime lover of Henry's who was once a street kid. Of course, you just know that folks who could find weird adventures with demons and wizards and werewolves and the like in toronto are going to have no problem running into the same kind of thing in Vancouver.

It's a good urban fantasy (which is definitely Huff's specialty), and it's also, in its setting, a hilarious send-up of the made-in-Canada action/supernatural TV syndication series industry. If you're a fan of Forever Knight or any of its more recent kin, you'll enjoy the goings-on from that perspective as well.

Reading Tanya Huff's novels makes me happy. I'm so glad she's already written two more novels in this new series for me to read.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Still haven't found Blood Price (so I'll probably have to get the collected Blood Books volume one to be able to read it when that comes out, and volume three for the short stories it'll collect), but I like the Smoke books better than the Blood books, inasmuch as they're funnier and the protagonist's point of view is better camped, no pun intended. I found the Blood books spent too much time telling me how awesome Vicki was (in Celluci's and Fitzroy's opinions) before getting around to showing it through her actions, though they each had very cool worldbuilding ideas (the sheepfarming werewolves and the quasi-scientific zombies in particular, and the logitistics of cross-country roadtrips for vampires), and they were a bit grim (obviously) so that although I liked them, they don't bring that sense of joy quite as well as the Smoke books do when I think of them.

Yeah, I think she's grown as a writer since the Blood books, and I think the dynamics between Tony and Henry make for a better evil-fighting relationship. The Vicki-Celluci-Henry love triangle made for a bit too much focus on some things, including why these two men were growling predatorially over her the way they often did.

I'm really looking forward to reading the other Smoke books - I've read your praises of them and that really stokes my expectations.

I'm wondering if there'll be another one after Smoke and Ashes.

The supernatural plot was a little less interesting than the ones for Shadows and Mirrors, but together the books work as a coming-of-age trilogy, which manages to be maddeningly open-ended, in the sense that I'd want the series to go on.

I can only imagine how many layers of meta Huff could pack into another Smoke book with the Blood books in the process of being turned into a TV series themselves.

My partner went shopping yesterday and bought Smoke and Mirrors for me. Along with several other books on my "I want to read this now!" list, which alas is now nine pages long (in 9pt Courier New).

Somehow the list keeps getting longer no matter how many books I buy. This is confusing. ;-)

On the up side, if you start on Smoke and Mirrors you'll probably be able to cross it off your list by the next day, since the odds are slim that you'd be able to put it down until you were finished reading. *g*

I rather expect that to be the case, since that's what happened when I read the first one. ;-)

Smoke gets in your mind

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