2017 urban fantasy, first of a series. Lydia Crow's parents got out of
the magical Crow family business, and she went further, to Aberdeen to
work as a private investigator. But now she's back in London and her
Uncle Charlie definitely wants her back in…
There's a fair bit of series setup here, establishing the four
great magical families of London (even if their power has faded a bit)
and their specialisations. Charlie acts more like a crime boss than
like a patriarch, giving Lydia a place to stay and just asking for
this one small favour, looking for his missing niece, and after all
she is a trained investigator…
Lydia is a bit of a failure, having tried various things in life but
never really found something that she could stick to. She's also
remarkably gullible and can't say "no" to save her life; and
sufficiently hormone-driven that I was honestly expecting the fling
she embarks on to turn out to have been magically set up in some way
(but there's no evidence of it here). On the other hand, while she's
not much in the way of magical talent, she's competent at the mundane
business of investigation in a way that other magical family members
haven't had to become. She also doesn't have their innate aversion to
talking to the police.
I liked Lydia, but I found the actual investigation somewhat
unsatisfying, doing as it does double duty in introducing what will
clearly be some of the series' regular cast and ending with a scene
that's action-packed but to me unsatisfying. Indeed, many of the big
questions of the setting are deliberately left hanging for future
books, and perhaps I'm a perfectionist but I feel it shouldn't be so
obvious that that's what's happening.
In spite of that, I had a good time and I'll read more in the series.
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