2021 modern fantasy, first in the Aurelia Ryder series, sequels to
Kate Daniels. Eight years after Julie Lennart left
post-magic-apocalypse Atlanta, Aurelia Ryder is back, with a new face,
a prophecy to subvert and a murder to solve.
So this is book 1 of a new series… and I suppose you could
start here. There are certainly clues about who's who, who's a power
in the land, and why it all matters, but without having read Kate's
books they would have little emotional resonance.
On the other hand if you have read Kate's books… all right, they
never promised a happy-ever-after, but it's eight years later, things
have gone to pot all through the city, and this is the sort of
problem Kate solves. She doesn't come on stage here, but she ought
to; she's not dead, she's not injured, and frankly a Kate who didn't
fight world-threatening menaces every once in a while would be a Kate
who became self-destructively bored. (But of course if she did turn
up she'd steal the book…)
Maybe it would have worked better if it had been set in a different
city of the same world. But several other characters from the Kate
books return, and the long-term reader can appreciate how they've
changed.
There's also sadly little of the Kate Daniels sense of humour. It's
not completely missing, but this is a book written in 2020 in the USA,
so it was never going to be a feast of cheerfulness. (Indeed, the Iron
Covenant sequels have been delayed, because they are rather darker and
the Andrews collective couldn't get into a mood to write them.) Still,
I thought the Kate books got that balance just about right.
The cloak hid all that, but it couldn't hide Dakkan, my spear. My
grandmother had a huge problem with that name, because the closest
translation of it to English would be "Stabby." She claimed it
wasn't a proper name for a weapon, so after the first Dakkan broke,
I offered to name the new one Sharpy McStabbison, the Son of Stabby,
after which she groaned and left my quarters, followed by a throng
of her advisors all giving me reproachful looks.
Basically this feels like something written in response to a demand
for more of the same, but because the Andrews collective are competent
they couldn't just turn the handle and crank out another Kate book.
That story really is over. But for my taste this is a bit too much of
an imitation Kate book for its own strengths to show through: here are
the battle scenes, here are the chunky powers, here's the obvious
romance that neither party can acknowledge because this is after all a
planned trilogy, all things that the Kate books did and what I
remember is the high points of those, so anything else is likely to
suffer by comparison. I'd frankly prefer more deviation from the Kate
pattern, enjoyable as that was, and more demonstration of how
Aurelia/Julie does things her own way and in the manner established by
her own personality.
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