RogerBW's Blog

The Copper Heart, Sarah Painter 17 February 2025

2020 urban fantasy, fifth of its series. Lydia Crow has taken over the Family. This has not made her life noticeably better.

And in what I'm coming to think of as the standard arc of this kind of book, she spends the first half not doing much about it. The head of the Silvers has died, and his successor despises Lydia; someone's nipping round the edges of the Crow enterprise (legitimate and otherwise); the man she rescued from an underhill in the last book keeps trying to track it down again. And there's the mysterious outsider which is trying to make the Families fight each other, and apparently everyone else is so tied up in the old patterns of behaviour that Lydia is the only person who can conceive of "someone attacked us" as having any answer beyond "it must have been our traditional rivals, let's attack them back".

Oh, and her boyfriend seems way more committed to her (putting his police job at risk in the process) than she is to him. And he has a developing magical power too.

This is clearly Phase Two of the overall story, with Lydia a (very junior) player in the power games rather than the capable pawn she was before, but she doesn't seem to have thought things through very much either before or after taking over. Why would you rely on just one person, known for his loyalty to the old boss, to find out how the rest of the family feels? (Is this more of the attempt to keep a small cast that I complained about last book?) Why would you hold a session to hear people's complaints, then forget all about them for a few days because something more interesting happened? Being the boss is a job, disconnecting the family from its criminal practice will be a bigger job, and Lydia doesn't seem to have grasped that.

In the latter part of the book when things start moving again matters do improve, but the stasis of the early chapters is hard work to overcome.

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Previous in series: Pearl King, The | Series: Crow Investigations

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