2021 urban fantasy, seventh of its series. Lydia Crow is starting to
take control of some of the many problems in her life.
She's still not very good at it, and she still favours the quick
fix over the more thoughtful but lasting solution, but my word it is
at least progress. And she is traumatised by the events of the last
book, on a magical level as well as the more obvious effects on body
and mind.
The most interesting of the problems is that in her attempt to turn
the Crow family legit, Lydia has let down people who were happy to pay
protection in return for a local monopoly on their business (though
the attempt to draw a bright line between legal and illegal gambling
is frankly unconvincing), and other explicitly criminal organisations
are moving in. There's an interesting challenge there, until it turns
out that most of the objections are being orchestrated by an
ill-wisher, which rather defangs the whole thing. (Also no prizes for
guessing who that ill-wisher is, though it takes Lydia a while to work
it out.)
At the same time, the question of Fleet's magical power remains
unresolved, though the ending cliffhanger gives a hint. The
relationship is still on-off and now they're lying to each other to
protect each other. Boring old man Roger wants to knock their heads
together and tell them to grow up a bit.
I like Painter's writing in general, but she's not shy of using tricks
that work against the story (like the relatively low word count of
each book, the padding to draw things out for as long as possible, and
the cliffhanger). I suppose that a writer in a competitive market like
urban fantasy may feel they need to do such things, and I can't say
they're necessarily wrong, but my word it makes for a bit of a reading
morass at times.
Still, it's an improvement on book 6, and even if a ninth book has
come out since I started reading these, I think book 8 should resolve
most of the currently dangling plot threads.