Hot Off the Press: A Review of Night Broken by Patricia Briggs

Night Broken by Patricia Briggs (pub. March 2014)

Other titles in the series (earliest to most recent): Moon Called, Blood Bound, Iron Kissed, Bone Crossed, Silver Borne, River Marked, Frost Burned

Night Broken is the latest adventure in the immensely popular Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs.  There are a lot of reasons that Briggs is consistently named as one of the best urban fantasy writers out there: her characters are fascinating, her plots intricate and complex, and the world in which her novels take place, while teeming with supernatural beings that (as far as we know) don’t really exist, is still so recognizably our own, fraught with post-9/11 political and racial tensions.  Night Broken is certainly no exception.

Fair warning: Some mild spoilers

Mercedes Thompson Hauptman, who goes by Mercy, is a Native American coyote walker–a daughter of Coyote who shapeshifts into a coyote.  She is not a werecoyote, subject to the phases of the moon; her nature is much different the weres.  Her husband, Adam Hauptman, is the Alpha of a werewolf pack, and Mercy is his mate.  This causes a lot of tension with some members of the pack, who don’t think much of coyote walkers.  At this point in the series, however, Mercy has won most of them over with her bravery and fighting skills, though there are still some holdouts who simply won’t accept her as either a packmate or as their Alpha’s mate.  So there’s some tension there.

Night Broken begins with a desperate phone call from Adam’s ex-wife, Christy, who wants protection from a dangerous stalker who has already killed someone.  Despite her best judgment, Mercy allows the manipulative woman–who still very much carries a torch for Adam, and retains the support of several of the pack members who don’t like Mercy–to move into their home so the pack can protect her.  From the moment she arrives, Christy schemes, manipulates, interferes, colludes, and otherwise does her damnedest to get between Adam and Mercy.  I was afraid Briggs was going to fall victim to the cliche of having Mercy think Adam was interested in Christy again and get angry and then they have to make up and blah blah blah, but of course she doesn’t, because she’s Patricia Briggs and Patricia Briggs doesn’t do cliches.

The stalker problem quickly spirals out of control when it becomes apparent that Christy’s spurned lover, who happens to be an arsonist and cold-blooded murderer as well, turns out not be human.  He’s like nothing that Mercy, her pack, or anyone she knows has ever encountered–and is the mostly deadly adversary that they have ever faced.

Mercy and Adam end up facing CNTRP (referred to as Cantrip) again–the shady government agency dedicated to investigating supernatural beings (and responsible for kidnapping and torturing them).  The ever-present threat of being arrested by Cantrip, to disappear into Gitmo, or worse, is definitely shades of post-9/11 Homeland Security.  It’s good, old-fashioned racism; the same ignorance, fear, and hatred faced by minorities in our own world is heaped upon the weres and the fae–the latter of which are actually on a reservation, and the former many Cantrip agents would like to round up and shoot.  This is a common theme in many urban fantasy series–it doesn’t take much imagination to envision that a world populated by supernatural creatures like skinwalkers, fae, weres, vampires, and so forth would be one where all of those groups would face serious racism.  In fact, I’d argue that books that don’t deal with that issue are unrealistic–and not in the any of the ways that make urban fantasy so great.

There’s are several subplots.  One involves the mysterious walking stick that has appeared in a number of other Mercy Thompson books.  Another involves Coyote himself, as well as another of his offspring, and a third very minor one involves the vampires Wulfe and Stefan.  It’s really more of a cameo that seems to be included solely to set up the ending, which is perhaps my one critique of the book: it’s a kind of vampire ex machina that causes me to downgrade my rating by half a stake.  It clunks a little, which could have been avoided if Briggs had incorporated the vampire subplot a little more extensively.

All in all, Night Broken is everything that fans of Patricia Briggs and Mercy Thompson have come to expect: exciting, emotional, sensual, fun, enlightening, and fantastic.

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stakes

A Review of Something More Than Night by Ian Tregillis

Something More Than Night by Ian Tregillis (2013)

This book.

This amazing, beautiful, brilliant book.

If you’re anything like me (a ravenous devourer of books), you have, in your lifetime of reading, come across That Book: the book that you would sell your [insert invaluable possession] to have written.  Not because it’s famous or because it would have made you lots of money, but because it is so exquisite that the mere thought that something so wonderful could have come out of your brain is enough to almost make you weep.

For me, this is one of those books.

Consider the opening lines:

They murdered one of the Seraphim tonight.

Gabriel streaked across the heavens like a tumbling meteor, his corpse a fireball of sublimated perfection. He had been a creature of peerless majesty, but now the throes of his death etched the firmament.

His wings, all six, shed embers of incandescent grace as his skidded across the night sky.  And when he opened his mouths to scream, the Earth could do naught but shudder.  The roar of his lion’s visage registered a 5.2 on the Richter, six hundred miles east of Kyoto.  The bellow of his ox’s muzzle roused a dormant volcano in Hawaii.  The shriek of his eagle aspect crumbled chimneys in Seattle.  The inaudible cry from his human face left people from Melbourne to Perth weeping in troubled slumber, dreaming of colors that no longer existed and sounds that hadn’t been heard since the Earth was just magma and poison.  Meanwhile, turbulence roiled a cloud of dark matter sleeting through the solar system.

How does that grab you?

I do so hate to sound sycophantic, but I am enthralled by this book.  Nearly every sentence is a symphony.  Of the many, many thousands of books I have read in my lifetime, not one has performed miracles of metaphor and world-building to rival SMTN.  It would not be an exaggeration to say that this book changed something inside me, as if I had been slightly out-of-tune without knowing it and this book realigned me with the universe.  The effect was so palpable and dramatic that I was tempted to start going door-to-door, asking, “Pardon me…do you have a moment to talk about this Really Good Book?” like some sort of literary evangelist.  (In fact, if you ask my friends, that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing to them since I first read it. I’m afraid I might have been a trifle obnoxious about it, but once you’ve heard the Good News, you just want to share it with everyone you know.)

If this sounds like hyperbole, please, hear me out.

I was hooked on the basic premise of the book before I even had a chance to swoon over the language: someone has murdered the Angel Gabriel, and a chain-smoking, booze-swilling, nearly-fallen angel named Bayliss–who talks, acts, and thinks exactly like Philip Marlowe–wants to know who and why and how.  So, it’s a hard-boiled detective novel…set in Heaven.

And what a Heaven.  It’s Thomas Aquinas’s vision of Heaven, according to the book jacket (well, the publisher’s synopsis, since ebooks don’t really have “book jackets” per se anymore).  I don’t pretend to be any kind of an expert on that topic, but you don’t have to know anything about it to thoroughly enjoy every aspect of this book.  Don’t worry–Tregillis (or Bayliss) will explain it all to you.  By the end, you’ll be something of an expert on Magisteria, the Pleroma, the Mantle of Ontological Consistency (MOC for short), METATRON, and so forth.  Tregillis is a physicist, which explains a lot–the book is crammed full of capital-S Science.  It’s like the beautiful, twisted love child of a physics book, Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, and Dashiell Hammett.  God is in the subatomic particles.  There is no room in this text for the false dichotomy between faith and science; Tregillis knows that one does not necessarily preclude the other.

The novel features two narrators: Bayliss, the aforementioned angel who is something of an outcast, and Molly, the unlucky (or lucky) human who gets drawn into Bayliss’s investigation into Gabriel’s death–and the extremely complex power struggles and politics of the Heavenly Choir, all of whom act like a bunch of squabbling preschoolers fighting over who gets the best toys and who has the prettiest Magisterium.  As if the stakes of trying to find out who killed Gabriel and why weren’t high enough, there’s a long game at work here too–one that Bayliss and Molly and all of humanity play a part in–and the whole of eternity is on the line.  Molly and Bayliss narrate alternating chapters, detailing their separate but parallel investigations into what happened to Gabriel.  Molly is fascinating; her reaction to the circumstances that get her involved seem realistic enough, and though at first she functions as a reason for Bayliss and others to explain How Things Work, she is so much more than that.  She’s smart and capable and impressively dynamic.  I like Molly a lot.

And about that ending–I’ve heard and seen complaints about it.  For my part, I like it and don’t think it detracts from the whole.  I’ll grant that It might have been executed a bit more smoothly, but to me it works just fine on the levels of both story structure and theme.  No spoilers from me, though–you’ll have to read it and judge for yourself.  If you’re anything like me, though, you won’t want it to end where you get there.

The only other consistent complaint that I’ve seen about SMTN is that it’s “too smart.”  Perhaps I’m not a good judge of whether something is “too smart”; I’m a smart person who likes a wide range of books.  And this is certainly not the novelization of Grown Ups 2.  It’s a smart book; there’s no doubt about it.  But if you’re a reader, I doubt you’ll find this book too much to handle.  In fact, I found it intellectually stimulating and invigorating.  If you like your hardboiled detective fiction with generous sides of physics and thinky thoughts, run–don’t walk–to get your mitts on this one.

One part hardboiled detective fiction, one part metaphysics text, SMTN is transcendent and unlike anything I’ve ever read.  If you read one book on my recommendation, let it be this one.  (And then hopefully you’ll see that I have impeccable taste and read more of my recommendations.)

MY RATING: 5 out of 5 stakes

The Spider’s Bite: Jennifer Estep’s Elemental Assassin Series

In 2010, Jennifer Estep, author of the YA series Mythos Academy, published Spider’s Bite, the first book in the Elemental Assassin series featuring Gin Blanco, a.k.a. The Spider.  Since then, she’s cranked out about two titles a year, chronicling the bloody adventures of The Spider, an assassin with, yes, a very particular set of skills.  Books in the series include Spider’s Bite, Web of Lies, Venom, Tangled Threads, Spider’s Revenge, By a Thread, Widow’s Web, Deadly Sting, Heart of Venom, and The Spider.  Two e-novellas, Thread of Death and Kiss of Venom, are also available.  A new book, Poison Promise, will be released in July 2014.

Gin Blanco was orphaned as a young child when power-hungry elemental Mab Monroe killed her mother and sisters in an attempt to wipe out a family whose powers were said to surpass her own.  Gin survives and is taken in by an assassin named Fletcher Lane, who raises her and teaches her to be a ruthless killer-for-hire like himself.  When Book 1 opens, Gin is thirty years old and already has made quite a name for herself as the assassin The Spider.  We meet Gin on a job; she’s gone undercover in a mental institution to get close to a predatory shrink who preyed on her clients.  She dispatches the shrink–and job for which she is being paid handsomely–then offs an orderly who rapes patients, just on principle, before escaping back to Fletcher’s BBQ joint, the Pork Pit.

We also learn that Gin has Stone Magic–she is an Elemental, or someone who has magic based on one of the four elements: Stone, Air, Ice, or Fire.  Gin can “listen” to stone, draw power from it, and even make her skin rock-hard to protect against attacks.  But she also has Ice magic, and her dual talents make her unusual and powerful–and an object of concern for Fire Elemental Mab Monroe, who is just one of many archenemies that Gin faces during the course of the novels.

As a character, Gin is delightful: she’s ruthless yet principled (as her execution of the rapist orderly demonstrates) and she’s fearless.  And she’s super, super good with knives.  Her tragic past sets up some conflicts that drive the earlier novels, but her transition from highly paid assassin to one-woman wrecking crew, determined to clean up the corrupt and violent city in which she lives, makes her far more enemies as the series progresses.  As an assassin, she kills people for money–sometimes, as in the case of the shrink, they’re people who seem to deserve killing, since they are killers themselves.  But others seem less deserving, and that makes Gin a little bit of an antihero, at least in the beginning.

A personal tragedy shifts Gin’s attention from murder-for-hire to revenge and then sets her on the path to trying to clean up the city.  With this, Gin loses a bit of the complexity that makes her so interesting.  It’s all black hats and white hats now–Gin vs. the legion of evildoers that populate the city and surroundings.  She becomes a kind of Robin Hood, defending the defenseless and taking on all comers, especially Mab and her crew and others who prey on the weak.  As Gin says in Spider’s Bite: “I’d never liked bullies.”

Over the course of the novels, Gin’s magic grows, as does her desire to right past wrongs–that is, get revenge on Mab Monroe for destroying her family.  Love interests come and go in her life; unlike some urban fantasy series, Gin’s identity is not tied to one “true love.”  Her ruthlessness and desire for vengeance aren’t altogether compatible with romance.  There’s heartbreak aplenty for The Spider.  But when you’re a highly paid assassin commanding more than a million dollars per hit, and you’ve made enemies with every crime boss and powerful Elemental in town, that’s not entirely unexpected.

In the most recent two books, however, Estep seems to be reaching for something for Gin to fight; the complexities of the earlier books have given way to a bad-guy-of-the-week structure that is less satisfying for those who have been on board since the beginning.  And the bad guys are so over-the-top bad that it’s almost funny.  Each baddie has to be 10x worse than the last.  The problem is that can’t keep going indefinitely, and I feel that in Heart of Venom we may have reached a tipping point with the baddie: he’s so odious as to be beyond belief.  Which is a problem, since willing suspension of disbelief can only get you so far.

My hope is that Estep will let go of the baddie-of-the-week structure and develop some more twisty plotlines that carry over between books more.  We’ve still got some baddies form the early books to deal with, but it looks like Gin has lost her groove a bit.  It’s time to sharpen those knives again.  Body count alone doesn’t make for a great book; if that were the case, Heart of Venom would be five stars.  We know that Gin is ruthless; we don’t need to see her kill fifty evil henchmen to believe it.  But Gin’s magic is more interesting than dispatching a self-styled woods emperor and his flunkies, even if they do enjoy playing the most dangerous game with college coeds and Gin’s friends.  Time for a reboot and a return to what made the series great to begin with, before it loses its way entirely.

MY RATING: 4 out of 5 stakes (but sliding downward)

The First Post: Meet Sandman Slim

Who (or What) is Sandman Slim?

Sandman Slim (a.k.a. Stark, a.k.a. the Monster Who Kills Monsters) is the protagonist of Richard Kadrey’s outrageously good series of books (as of March 2014, five books and a short story).  But God–or the Devil–forbid you call him James (or worse, “Jimmy”), or you might get a na’at through your gut.

The first book, intriguingly titled Sandman Slim, begins just after the title character’s escape from Hell:

“I wake up on a pile of smoldering garbage and leaves in the old Hollywood Forever cemetery behind the Paramount Studio lot on Melrose, though these last details don’t come to me until later. Right now all I know is that I’m back in the world and I’m on fire.”

And so, meet Sandman Slim. Actually, he prefers to be called Stark.  Just “Stark.”  His full name, as we come to learn, is James Butler Hickok Stark, and he is (allgedly) a direct descendant of “Wild Bill” Hickok.  We meet him too, in a later book, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

Before the novel begins, Stark has spent 11 truly horrifying years in Hell, thanks to the betrayal of some fellow magicians he thought were friends.  Yes, Stark is a magician.  Not the rabbit-out-of-a-hat kind, but the type with real magic (or “hoodoo,” as he calls it).  Stark, a very powerful, talented, and natural magician, ran up against a cocky and power-hungry jerk named Mason Faim, who felt threatened by Stark’s power and conspired with the rest of their Circle to send Stark to Hell.  In Hell, Stark fought Hellions in the arena as a kind of gladiator, owned by Azazel, one of the generals of Hell.  For 11 years, he was dissected, vivisected, torn apart, and sewn back together, and somehow managed to survive, focused on the thought of getting back to our world and exacting revenge on Mason and the others for their betrayal.  They call him the Monster Who Kills Monsters.

And about that na’at…a na’at is a Hellion weapon, and Stark loves to swing it both in Hell and on Earth.  Part harpoon, part whip, all badass–it’s Stark’s weapon of choice.

Then, something happens that gives Stark even more incentive to get back to Earth: his longtime girlfriend, Alice, dies at Mason’s hand.  He finds a way to get home–which is where we come in on page 1.  Now it’s payback, and we’re along for one hell of a ride (pun intended).

In a lesser book, Stark’s single-minded rampage would fill the rest of the book’s pages as he systematically hunted down each member of the Circle who betrayed him and unleashed Hell on their sorry carcasses.  But this is no lesser book.  Other than Mason, no one’s motives are simple or straightforward, and it gets increasingly difficult to tell who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy.  And it becomes increasingly apparent that Hell may suck, but at least you knew who to watch out for.  On Earth, it’s waaaaaay more complicated.  Even the angels are backstabbing, homicidal maniacs.  If you can’t trust an angel, who can you trust?

The world that Kadrey has built for his readers is one of the richest and most fascinating I have ever encountered.  There are vampires, natch; other magicians (called Sub Rosa, because they tend to be secretive and invisible); and ghosts and demons and zombies and angels and all other manner of supernatural beings.  In his quest to unleash Hell on his betrayers, Stark introduces us to a remarkable cast of characters and beings, including Lucifer, and, in later books, The Big Man Upstairs Himself.  (Well, He isn’t exactly Himself these days, but that’s a conversation for another day.)

Stark himself isn’t exactly human either–as with most urban fantasy protagonists, he’s something more.  I won’t spoil anything by revealing what he is, but it’s yet another layer on this particularly crazy and gleefully lopsided cake.  He’s a great character–even five books in, you have no idea what he’s going to do next, except that it’s going to be wild, explosive, and leave a big pile of bodies behind.  He’s definitely not the type to serve in Heaven, but he might be the kind of guy who could end up ruling in Hell.  *cough*

Kadrey’s writing style is really the icing on the crazy cake, and what turns this series up to 11, in my opinion.  Despite the violent brutality (lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of beings get their heads chopped off, spines ripped out, hearts cut out, limbs hacked off, and so forth), these books are among the wittiest I have ever read; it’s rare that more than a page goes by that I didn’t laugh out loud.  Stark’s name might as well be “Snark,” and his companions and opponents give as good as they get in that department.  If you like your UF with a hefty side of sarcasm and wit that cuts deeper than the sharpest blade, you’re in for a treat.

One of my few points of criticism for this series–and it’s a big one–is its women.  For all the genius and awesomeness of his writing, Kadrey doesn’t seem able to conceptualize women who aren’t straight out of central casting.  There’s Alice, the quirky and tough girlfriend with a heart of gold who loves her tough guy.  There’s Madea Bava, the Head Inquisitor for the Sub Rosa, who’s an old biddy with a serious axe to grind with Stark.  Aelita is a power-hungry angel who uses her beauty and sexual allure to manipulate the men around her.  The women around Stark start out interesting, then deflate faster than a five-day-old birthday balloon.  Allegra, an African-American woman with a shaved head who helps run the video store that Stark takes over, turns into a Healer and goes right back to two-dimensional and boring.  Brigitte, a zombie slayer who moonlights as a porn star, fades into the background after an initially awesome run ripping out zombies’ spines.  Even Candy, who ends up being Stark’s girlfriend, fails to be interesting.  She’s a Jade, which is a kind of vampire that sucks out all your innards.  Sure, she gives as good as she gets when it gets to breaking the furniture during sex, and she’s tough as hell, but she’s a static character who doesn’t grow at all during the course of five novels.  She is the most interesting of the female characters, and I can only hope that in subsequent novels, Kadrey does something with her.

How much this detracts from the overall experience of the series may vary.  For me, it wasn’t a total deal-breaker; the rest of the total package was strong enough to keep me hooked.  There’s great writing, compelling protagonists, a fascinating world, scary monsters, even scarier “good guys,” and fabulously twisty plots that get more complex from one book to the next.  We quickly learn that Mason Faim is not Stark’s only or most dangerous foe; he is surrounded by a host of humans and supernatural beings with a vested interest in seeing him either dead or back in Hell (but not necessarily in that order).  And then there’s the small matter of the Old Gods who want their universe back . . .

Get into Sandman Slim.  You’ll thank me.

MY RATING: 4 out of 5 stakes