2015 modern fantasy, eighth in the Kate Daniels series. Kate and
Curran have stepped down from leadership of the Pack, and are trying
to make new lives for themselves. But supernatural threats to Atlanta
don't stop; the ghouls are swarming…
That process of stepping down seems somewhat forced. We've been
told in previous books that if you're a shapeshifter, either you join
the Pack or you don't stay in its territory. Fair enough. Now it seems
that there's a procedure for ex-leaders to leave the Pack but still
stay local, and other Pack members can choose to join them… which
seems to me tailor-made for someone to start building the core of a
rival Pack, if the people involved in this particular case weren't so
carefully honourable about it.
At a narrative level, this change means that rather than having jobs
handed to her Kate has to go out and find them, which calls back
somewhat to the early books… but she now has much better ways of
finding the ones that are important.
Of course that's not the only thing going on, but what might be
disparate cases end up being effectively linked together. One of the
members of the Mercenaries' Guild, a shapeshifter, has disappeared on
a job, and the Pack won't do anything about it because his alpha
disapproves of his proposed match with the alpha's daughter; the Guild
itself is falling apart; and then what's all this about ghouls?
"I live here," I said. "I like Atlanta. I don't want this to be a
terrible place where people are ruled by assholes and afraid. You
live here, too. Don't you want this place not to turn into a
hellhole?"
This universe's version of ghouls is interesting, though I think most
of the questions about them are worked through in this book and I'll
be surprised if they play a major plot role again. The power level of
Kate's fights has increased, and so has the intelligence she has to
use to win them; going straight in has rarely been enough no matter
how powerful she was, and by this point in the series it really
isn't. Indeed, the climactic fight is won only by the cooperation of a
number of grudging allies, and building that alliance is one of Kate's
significant triumphs here.
They took my statement and then told me not to leave the scene. […]
The MSDU also took my statement and told me not to leave the scene.
When the Georgia Bureau of Investigation showed up, I told them up
front that I had no intentions of leaving the scene and that I
wasn't going to answer any questions unless they produced a police
captain who accused me of being a loose cannon and demanded my
badge. They left me alone after that.
And, after the missteps of Magic Rises, the protagonist couple are
back to treating each other like grown-ups; they have several battle
scenes together, and their effective teamwork should put the lie to
anyone who says that stories about happy couples can't be interesting.
Things are clearly being set up for the final confrontation, and
unless there's a truly huge misstep I'll follow it to the end.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.