Michelle Sagara: the Cast series

[bibliogramma]

Michelle West, writing as Michelle Sagara, has another interesting series going full blast: the Chronicles of elantra, perhaps better known as the Cast series.

At this point, I've read the first two books in the series, Cast in Shadow and Cast in Courtlight, and I am enjoying them, although not quite as much as West's other work - but I'll get into that a little later.

Fantasy doesn't often pay attention to the function of policing, being generally more interested in the doings of princes, heroes, wizards and occasional thieves, assassins and other folks from the underside who have great destinies ahead of them, for whom the local police are just another obstacle to get around. In this series, West has made her protagonist - Kaylin, a young women with a mysterious and traumatic past - a cop. She and her colleagues police the streets of the capital city of Elantra, where humans and a number of assorted other races dwell in uneasy proximity, surrounded by a band of lawless territories known as the Nightshade.

Kaylin was born in the Nightshade, where as a child she was caught up in a macabre series of ritual murders of children. she's grown now, and happy with her life - until the murders begin again and shadowy characters from her past come into her life once more.

There's a lot that I like to this series - the character and development of kaylin, the highly complex and structured society she lives in, which its multiplicity of cultures and people, all with different abilities, psychologies and customs, Kaylin's interactions with many of her colleagues and acquaintances - but this is another series published by Luna, and as with Judith Tarr's Luna series (published under the name Caitlin Brennan), there's sense that the romantic elements - which West is quite capable of handing in a way that I appreciate in other books - are just a little too foregrounded and formulaic at the same time. There's a little too much of the stereotype in some of the dark and mysterious men out of Kaylin's past, too much of the "is he evil, or just misunderstood" in their characters, too much of the annoyingly eternal triangle in their interactions with Kaylin.

That said, I'm reading 'til the end, because Kaylin herself is just too interesting to resist. Plus, she has a mentor who's a dragon, and I'm just a real sucker for that.