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.