2024 paranormal fantasy, fourth novel of its series. Bunny Barrington
tries to track down whoever it is laying curses on the townsfolk,
while coping with a visit from her domineering mother.
It looks as though this may originally have been intended as the
last volume of the series; all of the various ongoing questions about
Bunny's powers and background get resolved, she ends the book in a
good place, and so on. But an author's afterword announces that the
series will continue, and one more book is out already.
That said, she's still not a great detective, though she thinks she is
and nobody disabuses her of the idea. There's a Chekov's Skinchanger
that never comes to anything (but more significantly nobody ever
considers the ability to do a visual impersonation of anybody as
something that might be important). Her photographic memory seems to
have been largely forgotten.
I enjoy the writing, and the practical incidents, particularly the way
of realising that characters previously established in the series have
powers that could be useful in the present. But I found the answers to
the Big Questions essentially unsatisfying, and now that those
questions are apparently resolved I don't find any of these people so
thoroughly fascinating that I am enthused to see where things go next.
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