Smoke gets in your mind

[bibliogramma]

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.

Comments

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

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.