2019 urban fantasy, third of its series. Lydia Crow is blackmailed by
ex-boyfriend Paul Fox (of one of the other magical families of
London) to work on a vaguely-defined case. But who killed the guy, and
what dies his ghost want?
Which… well, if book 1 was the pilot episode to set up the world
and book 2 was a regular series episode that just nodded along, this
feels like part one of a two-parter. The core case does eventually get
solved, but it's almost anticlimactic, because the longer term plot is
becoming very obvious here: Lydia, whose father gave up his position
as Crow heir in order to marry her mother, is going to end up getting
involved with and probably leading the Crows. But she's the slowest
person to recognise this, being much more busy being in lust with her
policeman boyfriend while shying away from anything like gestures of
commitment.
And then things cut off right as she's in the process of taking early
steps in that direction, so this isn't at all a stand-alone book for
all it has reminders of the situation and the players for the benefit
of new readers. There's no actual conclusion here, only a vague sense
that the "immediate" boxes have all been ticked so we might as well
pause here.
This wasn't repetitive or slow exactly, but it sometimes felt like
hard work to get through, as Lydia blunders along not communicating
with anyone and not seeing any of the problems in her life that are
entirely obvious to the reader. She doesn't have a Great Trauma in her
past, so why is she such a damaged mess now? She wasn't in the earlier
books…
I'm getting a Genevieve Cogman feel from this series: I like the
situation, the writing is decent, but what actually happens in the
books isn't engaging me. Still, I'll continue and see what happens.