Onwards
It's moving day tomorrow. I've spent the last four weeks or so obsessively cleaning the place. The damp in our room is particularly horrible. I suspect I've started to get a mad glint in my eye every time the Hack goes near one of the many bleached, vinegared, salted and scrubbed surfaces. The flat smells a little like a chippy at the moment, but
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I think a lot of people are digging out the LJS again. She is back, after all, and even though it's been a decade, I want to read Strange Fate. It's weird though - all the fandom and fanfic has moved on so much, it all feels very retro.
I am going through them in order, so it'll be a while before I hit Soulmate. I hear it has been shamelesly ripped off in a new YA book (Evermore), only in this one, the Thierry equivalent dates the Maya equivalent between deaths. Classy, eh?
It is sad how NW has dropped out of the shelves. Although - hilarity! - did you ever read any of the Caroline B Cooney Point Horrors in a misspent youth? She wrote loads, but there was a vampre trilogy that stuck in my mind.
Well, I was in Foyles with a friend and we spotted these books and had a nostalgic squeal over them. Then we looked more closely. It was called Horror High or something, and as we read the blurbs, realised they looked...familiar.
Same books. But not realised under their old titles, oh no. Instead all the characters' names have been changed and made more modern and edgy, but the prose is exactly the same. Beneath the new covers (which are more Heartbreak High than Point Horror), it's the same glorious nineties horror. Pretty cheeky.
The Magic series centres around Kate Daniels, a mercenary in a world where magic and technology collide. It starts off as fairly typical fantasy fare - she's a problem solver of all things supernatural - but as the story goes on, the quality of characterisation and plot becomes apparent.
When her guardian is murdered, she finds herself caught between two groups of power-hungry supernaturals as she strives to find his killer. The Pack are led by super-sexy Curran, a lion shapeshifter who views Kate as alternately a threat, a nuisance, and a challenge. His goal is clearly the protection of his people at all cost - I get a sense of family from the shapeshifters in these books that you don't find elsewhere, for all that authors fake shoddy characterisation with descriptions of animal group habits.
The People are necromancers. They control vampires by riding their minds. This adds a whole new level of creepiness to both creatures, and makes the power plays and politics more interesting.
Kate herself is witty, tough, stubborn - again, fairly standard heroine descriptors. But there is something about the way Andrews writes her that really makes me love her. I like the fact when she makes a mistake, she has to suffer the consequences: and when she wins, she wins because she was smarter, usually, not just because she was uberpowered.
There are hints of her past which made me grimace a little in the first book and wonder if this was going down the Anita Blake route. I'm up to Book Three and so far it hasn't happened, so I'm hopeful. Her backstory is unravelled naturally, and Kate doesn't angst over it. It's there, she doesn't like it, but she deals and get on with life.
I've read a lot of urban fantasy (Anita Blake, Vickie Patterson, Jim Butcher, Carrie Vaughn, to name a few), and this is top of the heap for me. It's the only series I've stayed up till 2am reading, and the only book I'm actively waiting on in this genre.
Enough of a rec? Vague plot-wise, but I don't want to spoil it too much. All I can say is reeeeeeeeead it.
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