davidgillon | Currently Reading

I went on a little bit of an urban-fantasy binge, as that seemed to be what my reading muscles wanted, and ended up reading 5 books from S M Reine's Office of Pretenatural Affairs series in three days. I talked about the first book in the series here. The principle protagonist is Cèsar Hawke, an agent with the Office of Preternatural Affairs, the secret agency charged with dealing with magical crimes, demons and so on. Cèsar' s a witch, as is his partner Suzume 'Suzy' Takeuchi, both of whom used to work for the relatively low-end Magical Violations Department, but as a result of the first book Cèsar now finds himself and Suzy as part of a covert unit being run by his boss Fritz (who just happens to be a billionaire) from within MVD.

The start of the second book, Silver Bullet, picks up from the 'and next time' ending of 'Witch Hunt', with our heroes (Cèsar, Suzy, Fritz, and medium and unofficial OPA consultant Isobel Stormcloud, who may just possibly be Fritz's girlfriend), investigating a spike in magical energy levels in Reno, Nevada. An investigation which rapidly runs them into a powerful Nightmare demon, and a possibly even more powerful werewolf. And as if getting caught between those two in the war for an angelic artifact wasn't bad enough, Cèsar then makes the potentially fatal mistake of using his boss's phone. Cèsar pulls things together in the end, but we're rapidly learning that OPA may be just as bad as its opposition, and everyone seems to have secrets.

Hotter than Helltown has the crew back in their home office in LA, home to the eponymous Helltown, a suburb physically annexed to Hell itself in the 1960s, and a Saturday night check on a crank call has Cèsar and Suzy stumbling onto a horrific murder-mutilation, with clear signs of demonic involvement, and then a second, similar, murder shows up. As if a demonic serial killer on the loose wasn't bad enough, Cèsar's faux-pas with Fritz's phone in the previous book means he's now expected to magically bond himself with Fritz to guarantee his behaviour, but that's a level of magic way beyond his, and if he doesn't pull it off then he may find himself being terminated from the OPA with extreme prejudice. So no pressure then....

Shadow Burns starts with Cèsar and Suzy investigating reports of alleged manifestations at an old folks home, allegations that rapidly become all too real, culminating in the death of every resident. It's rapidly clear there's at least one very nasty demon involved, but there's another, more disturbing, link, to unofficial team member, and Cèsar's tentative girlfriend, Isobel Stormcloud, whose mysterious past is coming back to haunt her.

Deadly Wrong takes a new turn for the series, Cèsar isn't the protagonist, Isobel is. And in fact Cèsar and Suzy don't feature, this is purely Isobel and Fritz confronting the consequences of the truths Isobel found out in Shadow Burns, and the consequences of their past history together, a history Isobel doesn't even remember, a history she may have to die to find the truth of. And getting to that truth is going to be Hell.

Ashes and Arsenic finds Cèsar Acting Director of MVD while Fritz is out of town at a summit meeting between Heaven and Hell, and that gives him the luxury of allocating his own cases, only the nice, juicy, very witchy bank-robbery he hands himself and Suzy rapidly bites him in the backside when he turns up evidence implicating his own brother. Cèsar's problem then becomes trying to find out who is framing Domingo, keeping him from disappearing into OPA's covert jail system (emphasis on the disappearing), and dodging the trigger-happy female coven who are his favourite suspects, all without involving Suzy and the rest of OPA. And all the while someone is pushing forward a major ritual, one stretching right across LA, with unknown consequences and powered by human sacrifice.

I like these. They aren't likely to win any awards, but they're chewy brain candy, and they move along at a fair clap (they're mostly fairly short, in fact Deadly Wrong is technically a novella, though the others run around the 200 page mark). Cèsar and Suzy make a great couple of primary characters, and diverse primary characters at that. Cèsar does have a tendency to be a bit of a male chauvinist pig, but Suzy is perfectly placed to cause him physical pain when he gets out of line. The only reason I stopped reading at Book 6 is Book 7 isn't out yet. Reine has a bunch of series which all seem to be interlinked, most of them seem to have their early books priced at only a pound on Amazon, though I just picked up the first four books of her werewolf series Seasons of the Moon, and the first three books of her Descent series for a nice round nothing (the first book in the Preternatural Affairs series, Witch Hunt, goes for the same price).