Things that go ka-thump in the night

[bibliogramma]

Night Child, Jes Battiss

I have to admit, I’m picky about my urban fantasy. Two of my favourite urban fantasy writers are Tanya Huff and Mercedes Lackey – Huff’s Blood books were among the first urban fantasy I read, and I also like her Smoke trilogy and her Keeper novels. Lackey’s Tregarde mysteries and her series of novels featuring Bard Eric Banyon are also favourites. I used to like the Anita Blake novels before they became all about how many different supernatural species you can squeeze into one BDSM play party. And I think R.A. Macavoy’s Twisting the Rope is one of the best urban fantasies ever written.

The thread here is, broadly speaking, the detective story format. I read classic detective novels (Conan Doyle, Sayers, Christie, Marsh to name a few of my favourite authors over the years), I watch a fair selection of police procedurals on TV, particularly the ones focusing on forensics, and I like urban fantasy that involves paranormal beings and abilities in a crime-solving format.

Which is why I was so interested when I happened across the author’s website and read the background for his first novel, Night Child, featuring occult special investigator Tess Corday, who works out of Vancouver’s Mystical. The premise is that, unbeknownst to most of us, all sorts of paranormal beings live around us, and like us, some of them are criminals. So naturally, also unbeknownst to us, there is a secret police organisation dedicated to solving crimes involving paranormal creatures when they impinge on the world of ordinary humans.

The biggest plus for me was the abundance of female characters on all sides of the investigation. Tess Corday is an interesting protagonist in that she isn’t always super-strong or super-right, and she has a backstory that is only partly unravelled by the end of this, the first book in a planned series (Battis was working on the third book in the series as of the last interview I read).

One of the biggest weaknesses was that the complex histories of the various groups of paranormal beings, and the nature and origins of the relationships between human and paranormal species, communities and organisations wasn’t as clearly explained as I would have liked, so that at times I was a bit lost as to exactly what was happening.

I also found myself a little disappointed in one respect. The author makes a point in his forward to the book that one of his goals in writing this novel – and, one hopes, a number of sequels – is to write positively about queer characters in an urban fantasy setting. After making such a point, I was disappointed to find that the only obvious recurring queer character so far is the female protagonist’s sidekick. Going back to Huff and Lackey, both of these genre writers and others have been writing positive, openly queer characters – leads as well as secondaries – in their novels for 20 years now. Yes, there’s plenty of room for more, but in that context, it hardly seems appropriate for the author to present the novel as something different or new for its treatment of queer characters.

Still, I enjoyed the mystery and the crime solving, and I do look forward to reading more of the occult forensic adventures of Tess Corday.

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