2011 urban fantasy, ninth in the series. Kitty Norville, the
late-night DJ who has become the world's most famous werewolf, goes to
San Francisco to help out a friend. Who happens to be a vampire…
And the "big trouble" is that most of the action happens in the
shadow realm of the tunnels under Chinatown (because, obviously,
they're still there in a magical sense even if you can't find them by
mundane means any more). And that's handled reasonably well: Kitty
realises that she is an outsider messing with local affairs, and does
her best to use some unaccustomed tact, particularly when it turns out
that, as well as werewolves and vampires, actual gods exist in this
world too.
We waited. No one could hurry this woman or make demands. She could
ignore the tableau before her forever, and that would be fine. And
what a tableau—two Chinese women who obviously knew who and what she
was and were awed into immobility; and three white-bread American
tourists, rude and ignorant, cowboys in a china shop, as it were. If
we didn't move, maybe we wouldn't break anything.
But the plot's very light, basically running from point to point
without much in the way of investigation. Ben, Kitty's husband, with
no outlet for his legal skills in this adventure, has been reduced to
just someone who worries about her. And everyone is just, well,
static; Kitty at the end of this book is basically the same person
as Kitty at the beginning, and the same with everyone else – even
though they now know that gods can be real, which you'd think would
make for a bit of alteration in their attitudes to just about
everything, they go on as before. It's very much an entry in a series
rather than part of an ongoing narrative.
It's OK as that series entry, I guess, but it has surprisingly
little to say.
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