2021 urban fantasy, sixth of its series. Lydia Crow is now a cork on
the seas of fate.
Perhaps that's not fair, but it was the way I felt while reading
it. The pacing in these books has tended to start slowly with
atmosphere and investigation, then build to a more active climax,
which is fair enough. But Lydia here is thoroughly reactive: there are
threats and problems out there, there are promises she's made and has
to keep, but it's all framed in terms of Lydia being reminded of a
problem, doing something about it, then forgetting it to deal with the
next problem, rather than setting out to do anything on her own
initiative. All right, she has a lot of problems in her life and
perhaps doesn't have time to do more than firefighting, but there's no
sign that she realises this.
In fact I see a bit of a parallel here: just as Lydia's life is full
of problems that can be put off temporarily, so is the series full of
unresolved plot threads, which get briefly touched on and then
abandoned again because after all there's only so much word count to
work with. We get a little bit more on Fleet's magic power, a little
bit more on Chartes the silver- and goldsmith, a little bit more on
the missing Silver family cup, a reminder that Uncle Charlie is out
there somewhere… but there's very little development on any of them,
except for the final (?) resolutions of a couple of these threads that
crop up in the closing scenes.
Which isn't bad, but as I felt back in book 2, there's a great deal
of day-to-day stuff and not a whole lot of progress. If the
pattern of the first four books repeats in the last four, the next one
should be rather meatier.