My life in books

This year I read the final volumes in some series I had enjoyed: Jes Battis' interesting and original urban fantasies featuring Occult Special Investigator Tess Corday; the Vampire Princess of St. Paul series, a young adult urban fantasy about witches and vampires in the twin cities, by Tate Hallaway aka Lyda Morehouse; and the angels of Samaria series by Sharon Shinn.

While these series did come to conclusions that seemed appropriate, I rather hope that I'll see Tess Corday again, and I do want to see what lies in the future of the first Vampire Queen.


Jes Battis, Bleeding Out

Tate Hallaway, Almost Final Curtain
Tate Hallaway, Almost Everything

Sharon Shinn, Angel-seeker
Sharon Shinn, Angelica

The genre of fantasy is rapidly subdividing these days, and I'm not entirely certain what the distinctions are any more. I am sticking with urban fantasy as something that ha
a definition of urban fantasy as something that involves humans interacting with non-humans (vampires, demons, werewolves, elves, whatever) and the use of magic or psychic powers virtually indistinguishable from magic, in an urban setting that is directly based on real world settings (modern-day Toronto or Chicago or whatever). It may involve crimes or mysteries, or it may involve supernatural romance. Or both. I"m not all that fussy.


Jes Battis, Inhuman Resources

Battis' OSI series has held my interest through three volumes to date, and I have the fourth in my TBR pile. The premise is that there is an investigative force, CORE, complete with Occult Special Investigators, that is charged with the responsibility of dealing with all sorts of non-human and occult communities (vampires, necromancers, sorcerers, and so on) secretly co-existing with "normate" human society, investigating crimes involving members of these communities, and keeping the whole business quiet so those ordinary humans can never know. The stories focus on OSI Tess Corday, a woman of mixed heritage (and by that I mean human and demon) and her investigative partner (and roommate) Derrick Siegel. Together they solve crimes! - with the aid of an interesting collection of supporting characters, of course. But behind the episodic nature of the occult crime procedural is a sweeping arc that has to do with Tess' demon heritage.


Katharine Kerr, Licence to Ensorcell

With her lengthy Deverry Cycle epic fantasy series completed, Kerr has decided to explore the urban fantasy/paranormal romance genre, and in my opinion she quite nails it with this first volume in the new Nola O'Grady series. O'Grady is a an operative with a secret agenct whose mandate you can probably figure out right away, and her new case is to find a serial killer targeting werewolves. It's personal - O'Grady's brother was one of the victims. Her partner on the case is a hard-boiled Isreali operative, assigned to work with her because the serial killer has claimed victims in both Israel and the US. I like this new series, and the next volume is in my infamous TBR pile.


J. A. Pitts, Black Blade Blues

This is a first novel from author J. A. Pitts, and there is some roughness to it, but the premise - a lesbian blacksmith who moonlights as a props manager and is part of a medieval reenactment society - was not the sort of thing I could resist. And there are dragons! To continue the refrain, the next volume is in my TBR pile.


Kevin Hearne, Hounded

Another first novel, and a very fine one too. But how could I resist a novel about the last of the Druids, currently living in Arizona under the unlikely name of Atticus O’Sullivan. The rest of the cast of characters includes his Irish wolfhound, a werewolf and a vampire who happen to be his lawyers, several Celtic deities, the spirit of an ancient Hindu sorceress and a coven of witches. And it's funny too - Hearne has a pleasantly dry wit that is well integrated into the style and storytelling. The next volumes is... oh, you know where it is.


Tate Hallaway, Almost to Die For

You, constant reader, already know that I think very highly of Lyda Morehouse's work, and of course you are aware that Tate Hallaway is the name Morehouse uses for her contemporary supernatural urban romance fantasy work (did I cover all the bases there?). This is the first volume in a new YA series about a teenaged girl whose father happens to be the leader of the vampires in her city, and by vampire tradition, that makes her his heir. I liked it, and... you guessed it, the next volume is in my TBR pile.


Tate Hallaway, Honeymoon of the Dead

And, to balance all these new series, this is the last volume in Morehouse/Hallaway's Garnet Lacey series. Garnet and her vampire lover Sebastian von Traum are finally married - but Garnet's past gets in the way of their planned honeymoon in Transylvania. A good ending to an enjoyable series. No more volumes to put in my TBR file. Sniff.

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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