An imperfect but immersive crime fantasy.
A witch cop fights to get a murderous demon off the streets in Hopkins’ debut urban fantasy novel.
By all outward appearances, Rachel Collins is an ordinary agent for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, a totally unremarkable, nonmagical law enforcement organization. In reality, though, she and her partner, Ethan Hale, are deputies working for the High Council of Witches, which aims to make sure that corrupt witches and unregulated supernatural creatures don’t run amok in the human world. “We’ve got our own trials, our own judges, our own prisons—even our own executioners….It’s like Law & Order, but with witchcraft,” Rachel narrates. However, she isn’t fond of the job. She doesn’t get along with her superiors, she’s always in danger of discovery from human law enforcement, and, as noted, sometimes she has to kill. To make matters worse, her magic manifests in unpredictable and dangerous ways—a fact that tends to make other witches wary. After all, a witch who delves too far into magic can easily become evil. Rachel gets a call from her brother, Danny, about a case that the Council turned down for investigation. A human with ties to the local werewolf pack has gone missing, and Danny has an obligation to find her, as a favor to a friend. Rachel is happy to flout the Council’s wishes, and she throws herself into locating the woman, but it soon becomes clear that they’re dealing with a much larger problem than one missing 21-year-old. The Council warns Rachel off the case, but she’s already in too deep—obsessed with catching a serial killer and spending time with Sean Callahan, a handsome demon hunter also working the case.
Hopkins’ prose, as filtered through Rachel’s perspective, is snarky and muscular, as when Rachel wonders if she’s successfully talked her way out of a potentially difficult situation with an ordinary cop: “If I’d been in his hotbox, I would’ve been fidgeting and asking for a lawyer….I was asking him to believe one truth and a whole basket of lies, and I didn’t think he was buying it. He stared at me for about seven thousand years, then turned and walked away. Nice job, Rachel.” The book is fairly standard fare for the genre, but fans of urban fantasy will appreciate Hopkins’ handling of the material; she doesn’t let the mythology get too complex, and there are some fun iterations on magical crime fighting, such as Rachel’s spell-piercing ammunition. Hopkins also isn’t afraid to take the story into dark places; in the first scene, for instance, Rachel is forced to kill a magic-corrupted teenager, and readers will wonder if she’ll be able to get to the bottom of what’s going on without becoming a villain herself. However, the author doesn’t quite sell the psychological element of the protagonist’s wins and losses. Not every reader will require the level of emotional unpacking that the author does here, and others may wish that the more important moments resonated more.
An imperfect but immersive crime fantasy.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Natural Ten Media, LLC
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Unrelenting, and not in a good way.
A young Navarrian woman faces even greater challenges in her second year at dragon-riding school.
Violet Sorrengail did all the normal things one would do as a first-year student at Basgiath War College: made new friends, fell in love, and survived multiple assassination attempts. She was also the first rider to ever bond with two dragons: Tairn, a powerful black dragon with a distinguished battle history, and Andarna, a baby dragon too young to carry a rider. At the end of Fourth Wing (2023), Violet and her lover, Xaden Riorson, discovered that Navarre is under attack from wyvern, evil two-legged dragons, and venin, soulless monsters that harvest energy from the ground. Navarrians had always been told that these were monsters of legend and myth, not real creatures dangerously close to breaking through Navarre’s wards and attacking civilian populations. In this overly long sequel, Violet, Xaden, and their dragons are determined to find a way to protect Navarre, despite the fact that the army and government hid the truth about these creatures. Due to the machinations of several traitorous instructors at Basgiath, Xaden and Violet are separated for most of the book—he’s stationed at a distant outpost, leaving her to handle the treacherous, cutthroat world of the war college on her own. Violet is repeatedly threatened by her new vice commandant, a brutal man who wants to silence her. Although Violet and her dragons continue to model extreme bravery, the novel feels repetitive and more than a little sloppy, leaving obvious questions about the world unanswered. The book is full of action and just as full of plot holes, including scenes that are illogical or disconnected from the main narrative. Secondary characters are ignored until a scene requires them to assist Violet or to be killed in the endless violence that plagues their school.
Unrelenting, and not in a good way.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374172
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
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