An enjoyable fantasy mystery that tackles physical disability and mental illness without sacrificing diverting, fast-paced...
In a debut novel that promises to be the first volume of an engaging urban fantasy series, Baker introduces a hard-edged but appealing heroine and a version of Los Angeles that pairs Hollywood with a magical parallel world.
Millicent Roper lost both her legs and her aspirations for a career in film after an unsuccessful suicide attempt. She installs herself in a psychiatric facility in Los Angeles, fading under the burden of borderline personality disorder and a surfeit of associated unhappiness, until a mysterious stranger offers her a job at the Arcadia Project. Jerked out of her self-imposed inertia, Millie discovers that magic—real, world-warping magic—exists and that her prospective employers are part of a shady organization charged with regulating traffic between the human and fairy worlds. Her introduction to this strange reality offers the reader plenty of comforting entertainment, despite the fact that the Arcadia Project is staffed by former psychiatric patients, often troubled and unpredictable. Millie meets a host of appealing, oddball characters and finds herself embroiled in a conspiracy with elements of Hollywood glamour, gritty mystery, and lavish fairy-tale magic. The plot trundles along at a pleasant clip, and the story is easy to keep reading, though it sometimes layers so many unlikely incidents that it strains credibility even in a world stuffed with the fantastical. Millie, brash and volatile, crashes through and pulls everything along in her wake. Though often waylaid by the troubles of her mind and difficulties of her body, Millie’s stubborn insistence on survival and frequent matter-of-fact dissections of her problems manage to provoke fondness instead of pity. She faces catastrophic damage and carries on with the verve, sarcasm, and decency that bode well for a developing series.
An enjoyable fantasy mystery that tackles physical disability and mental illness without sacrificing diverting, fast-paced storytelling.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4814-5306-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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