Recent Reading - Jan 2024

[davidgillon]

I bought several multi-volume series on Amazon before Christmas as I knew I'd be offline for most of the holidays and wanted to be well stocked for new reading. The three I ended up reading (DNF'd a fourth as just too irritating at about page 30) were:

Chooser of the Slain, 9 books, 'Created by Michael Anderle'

Near-future technothrillers, but with a protagonist, Val Kearie, playing host to a reborn Valkyrie. It's probably not a good sign when the author's notes to book _4_ mention that he's decided to read up on Valkyries. This possibly explains why Val is able to manifest wings, horns and claws, none of which are prominent in traditional Valkyrie lore. Continuity is a bit problematical, but at the plotting level, rather than the oopsie level. He keeps building up cross-book antagonists and then putting them on a bus, and there's a major plot thread that just isn't explained. I suspect it's due to be explained in a further series, and I just can't be bothered. They're very readable if you like technothrillers, but I can't help feeling this would have been better as a three book series, rather than a nine book series thrown out at a book a month.

Great Lakes Investigations, 9 books, Phillipa Norcross, Michael Anderle

Embarrassingly it took me 4 books to realise these are set in Canada, not the US. In mitigation I plead the fact that they're set near Sault St Marie and there's one on either side of the border (and I know more about the US one). Their being set within a parallel magical civilization, a bit Harry Potter style, meant there were no handy references to Mounties or the like to clue me in earlier.

For a series about a private investigation agency, there's surprisingly little investigating, three or four cases in the entire series, instead they're about series protagonist Maggie trying to get over her twin brother Matt's death in a car crash she walked away from. He was a wolf shifter, her thing is time magic - being able to rewind time is a very useful talent for a PI. But in the first book her magic is going a bit wonky and things spiral out from there. The series is good at characters, Maggie, Matt, Ferrow their hyper-organized naga secretary, Shalton who hires Maggie to find his son and decides to take her on as a surrogate daughter, and so on - lots of found family. What it's not so great at is plotting. The individual books are generally okay, but the series planning isn't. There's a huge thing about the importance of tracking down Maggie's parents/family/ancestry (dad is AWOL, mom is dead), and she does eventually track down both, taking at least a book for each, and then never asks either of them anything. *headdesk*. Second series clearly signalled.

OTOH kudos to the author for working out how just plain nasty shifter society could get without the people within it really being aware. And kudos  too for setting up something in the title of the first book that doesn't play out until the climax of book 8.

I think what we're seeing is the weakness inherent in the book every month format. You could get around it with good beta readers and a good editor, but that doesn't seem to be the setup with any of these.

Witch-Warrior, 12 books, T R Cameron, Martha Carr, Michael Anderle

This really shows the problem the drive to write 9 or more books in a series to be put out at one a month causes, there's an author note about book 5 where one of them mentions they've been told their numbers are good enough it's going to be 12 books not 9. Which a) is a huge amount of extra plot to shoehorn in, and b) probably should be the author's decision. Anderle's down on the author list, but I suspect he should really be publisher, and this explains how he's managed to produce around a thousand books since 2017. (Sadly not exaggerating).

Anyway Cait Keane is Irish, from a twee village of witches, but commutes to work in near-future Boston as a US Deputy Marshal. In order to generate enough plot, by book three or so Cait is 1) doing her day job as a marshal, 2) part timing with the Marshal's Special Operations Group, 3) running an after-hours career as a cat-burglar, 4) occasionally helping out a government black ops group (fairly sure they've strayed in from another series), 5) helping out the less malevolent of Boston's two crime families against the other, 6) helping defend her family's village and the neighbouring town against wolf shifters who've given them an ultimatum to leave*, 7) helping defend her dragon partner's family against an amorphous threat, 8) intermittently running Tomb Raider style violations of ancient ruins with her archaeologist father in order to fund her various afterhours activities - and both the last two take place on a parallel world that's also strayed in from another series. Oh, and her mother wants her to start having babies. There are so many plot threads to resolve one of them is quite literally put on a bus (okay, a plane).

On the plus side, decent writing, decent characters, Cait's infomancer friend Sabrina is clearly written to be a fan favourite, and the local crime bosses get decent development. On the minus TOO MANY PLOY ARCS!!! And if you're going to set a series with two crime families in Boston, notorious for its Irish organised crime groups, why make them Chinese and Italian?

And yes, there's a spin-off series with Cait's little sister, the spy.

* So Cait may work for the US Marshal's Service, but magical Ireland apparently hasn't invented the Garda.

Seeing as I got these for £0.99 each I can't complain too much, but I do think they were all weakened by the drive to throw out as many as possible, as quickly as possible.