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Bookflog: Divine Misdemeanours chapter one & Darla news
I made a promise to myself that I should try to post more news to the comm when I come across it rather than hoard it on my journal. I've been following Darla's progress on the internets since she left Team LKH. She's written a book called "Working for Miriam" and shared some parts (sorry, she wrote some "antedotes"), but unfortunately could not find an agent to pick it up. So she turned her energy to writing a scifi/fantasy novel, but hasn't mentioned anything about that for a while. But the latest is that she's going to publish her Anitapedia on Lulu.
And lets hear it for those that love us! Me particularly. LOL! I am not going to burn the Anitapedia now. Someone I know pointed out, that lots of hard work went in to that so why not self publish since I have been waiting almost nine years. So I will.
I cannot put into words just how much I want this. Purely for science! And possibly FOR GREAT JUSTICE! Or at the very least Great Irony.
In other news, LKH has the first chapter of Divine Misdemeanours for download as a PDF on her website. Or, as LKH announced, "Divine Misdemeanors, who’s first chapter is up on our website." -- the book is a who now. And she wasn't lying when she said she got it straight from the publisher, because it's still in its raw formatting stage. Thankfully, those spelling errors that were in the first few paragraphs that she posted have been corrected. Well, "eucalyptus" is still a pronoun, but now Merry works for Grey Detective Agency: Supernatural Problems; Magical Solutions.
Now that I got your hopes up, I can dash them by revealing just how bad the writing still is even after editing.
Merry is at a crime scene. We know this because she's wearing a pretty, pretty dress and her hair is loose, but she can't tie it back because she's wearing latex gloves. Her life, so hard. All the other cops around can manage a small degree of professionalism, but none of them are totally legit faerie princesses!
On a side note: as someone who lives in a country full of eucalyptus trees...they're not spicy. At least, not to me. I have a shocking sense of smell, but gum trees smell zesty, or possibly lemon fresh-y to me, and it reminds me of cold medicine. I don't know, they might seem exotic to someone who isn't around them all the time, but given that Merry says that southern California is her home away from home...uh, she ought to be used to it? I'm confusing myself now.
If it had been this many adult human-sized bodies the Eucalyptus wouldn't have had a chance, but they weren't adult-sized.
I read this line via Twitter when LKH was teasing fandom with one sentence at a time, and I wanted to Tweet back to her, "are you talking about the trees being human-sized?" because that's how I read the sentence. And the more I look at it, the more I get O____o because it's...just...
Look, let's rewrite this: If there had been this many human-sized bodies, the smell of blood would have been overwhelming. Thankfully, the corpses were not human.
There, I fixed it for you. And for all I know, demi-fey smell like lavender and rainbows when they're dead. They're faeries.
There's a coy dance around saying "look, there's a bunch of demi-fey that are dead," by going through the agonising description that they were the size of dolls, but they were not dolls, and somehow their wings were frozen mid-motion (which does not make any sense if they're posed on their backs - unless their wings are propping them up? Which makes even less sense given how fragile butterfly/moth wings are), bouquets of wilted flowers still grasped in their tiny dead hands, and finally the whole thing like it's some graceful dance. So...dead people got served? They died in the middle of busting a move? Who's the unfortunate one stuck stirring the pot or raising the roof? Either the bad guy had a freeze-ray to accomplish this, or there was a lot of fiddling about with pipe cleaners to get them posed likes this. That is one dedicated bad guy.
Detective Lucy Tate turns up, and insert headdesking here.
[Lucy] was wearing a pants suit complete with a jacket and white button-up shirt that strained a little across the front because Lucy, like me, had too much figure for most button-up shirts. But I wasn't a police detective so I didn't have to pretend I was a man to try and fit in.
lkh_lashouts has had a field day over this so I'm not even going to rehash the indignation.
So, on with the show.
"They're laid out like something from a children's storybook down to the dancing poses and the flowers in their hands."
Lucy nodded. "It's not just like, it is."
"Is what?" [Merry] asked, looking at her.
...
Having read the chapter, the next part should be about a vital clue in the form of a page from a children's book that has an illustration just like the grisly scene before them. Instead, we get a paragraph waffling on about how Merry is both a detective and a faerie princess, and if she had only been one of these things (or neither), she would not be there. No, the vital clue comes after Merry's private me-time. Despite the page being in a plastic evidence cover-thing, and Merry wearing gloves, she still doesn't touch it for fear of contaminating the evidence or something equally dumb.
Merry points out that the bad guy had to bring the clothes the demi-fey are wearing, because they never would have worn anything like that outside of the Sithen. She knows this because she's seen them wear "three piece suits and formal evening wear." In LA weather? Okay. Lucy asks if they could have worn their current outfits out here anyway, and Merry says no, because "[t]hey wouldn't have matched perfectly without planning it this way."
"We were thinking he lured them down here with a promise of an acting part, a short film," [Lucy] said.
This is both hilarious and tragic (hilagic?) to me. This is LA! Everyone wants to be in the movies! Does anyone ever go to LA for any other reason?
UGH. LKH's fondness of defining things that people can either work out for themselves, or already know, now rears its head.
"The demi-fey, the small winged fey, have a particular fondness for natural circles."
"Explain."
"The stories only tell humans not to step into a ring of toadstools, or a ring of actual dancing fey, but it can be any natural circle. Flowers, stones, hills, or trees, like this circle. They come to dance in the circle."
I, the humble reader, am not stupid. Anyone that's stuck with the books this long is going to know this. Anyone who's never read a Merry Gentry book but knows that it's about faeries (and why wouldn't you? It's usually right there in the blurb), can probably work this out. And what's more, I'm pretty sure Lucy is not an idiot, otherwise she would not have made detective, and she's probably got some mean note-taking skills or at least a freakish memory in order to look this stuff up, specially if she's been dealing with faerie-related crime for a while. But no, all this pales in comparison of Merry's smarts and she's right there as a resource, so she might as well spout as much information as possible. This could be Lucy's very cunning plan to learn as much as she can in one hit and then exclude Merry from the rest of the investigation in case she screws things up, in which case I adore Lucy and I want to be her when I grow up as I would not have nearly so much grace in the face of such a moron, supernatural royal or otherwise.
There's a bit of a back and forth between Lucy and Merry as to what the possible motive of the bad guy could be. Lucy thinks the bad guy lured the demi-fey out there with the promise of a bit-part in a short movie, but it's also possible that the guy was stalking the demi-fey if they frequented this particular clearing. If it's the former, then there's more leads for the police to track down and thus less use for Merry around, but if it's the latter...well, it's harder to be a detective of any kind. I'm sorry, I had no idea that solving crime was more about looking at what might be easier to investigate rather than finding out what happened.
Then Lucy says, "Don't say he. You don't know the killer is a he." (which seems weird because she's the one that referred to the Big Bad as a "he" in the first place, and never mind that statistically there are more male serial killers than female) and Merry agrees and asks if the police assume the killer is human. Her reasoning is that humans are not strong or fast enough to do this. Also, we finally get a cause of death -- the demi-fey had their throats slit. Lucy asks if the demi-fey are as fragile as they look, and Merry says no and repeats that they're fast. However, she has to concede that with some magic, a human could do this to them. When asked what kind of magic someone might need, Merry replies:
"I don't have a spell in mind. I'm not human. I don't need spells to use against other fey, but I know there are stories of magic that can make us weak, catchable, and hurtable."
Right, so back in book two when Merry had to use the fertility ritual for Maeve, that had no spell component to it at all. Admittedly, I haven't read beyond Mistral's Kiss, so there's probably been some patches to Merry's Princess app that I'm missing. I am purposely overlooking the "catchable and hurtable" thing just so I don't give myself an anneurism.
Merry goes off into screen saver mode while she monologues internally about lesser fey dying from mundane causes like falling down the stairs, and immortality isn't what it used to be. Goddamnit, I hate it when we import cheap immortality knockoffs even if they do look very, very shiny.
For once, a character in the story notices the glassy-eyed, head-tilted heroine and calls her on it. Lucy kinda snaps Merry out of it and Merry pleads a severe case of "I'm not used to Seeing Dead People (tm)." before finally answering the question that yes, demi-fey were meant to be immortal. If this were CSI, we'd have Horatio make his pun by now, slide his glasses back in place and we'd be rocking to The Who. But no, we're not done with the internal monologuing yet. Lucy asks how the killer manage this -- look, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say the killer slit their throats, but what do I know? I'm not a faerie princess -- and Merry goes on about how this one time at band camp, an Unseelie noble used a cold iron blade to kill a demi-fey. And the court had killed him.
AHAHA.
We'd killed the sidhe who did it, although he said that he hadn't mean to kill her. He had just meant to wound her through the heart as her desertion of him had wounded his heart -- poetic and the kind of romantic drivel you get when you're used to being surrounded by beings who can have their heads chopped off and still live.
I can just see this guy waving a knife around all, "OOPS, MY BAD. I ONLY MEANT TO KILL HER A LITTLE BIT. YOU THINK SHE'LL TAKE ME BACK?"
Anyway, back to the case at hand. Merry does not think a sidhe did this as it "had the taste of something much more convoluted than that -- a motive that only the killer would understand." I don't know about you, but I'd think that being a detective would mean trying to figure that part out and, like, detect the killer. I could be over-thinking this.
I looked carefully at my own reasoning to make certain I wasn't talking myself out of the Unseelie Court, the Darkling Throng, being suspects. The court that I had been offered rulership of and given up for love.
I would love to see an Unseelie try to say something like, "Princess Meredith, we offer you rulership of our Dark Court," with a straight face. It might be a drinking game -- see who can get the furthest through the declaration before cracking up, the loser has to buy the next round. It's entertainment for the whole family.
But whatever, this is an excuse for Merry to break out the "woe is me" card and reflect upon how people died, y'all, some she even killed herself, and that "Love had just been the emotion that had led me to what I truly wanted, and who I truly was."
Lucy has to snap Merry out of it again, and we're back to being dumb.
"What are you thinking, Merry?"
"I'm thinking that I wonder what emotion led the killer to do this, to want to do this."
"What do you mean?"
"It takes something like love to put this much attention into the details. Did the killer love this book or did he love the small fey? Did he hate this book as a child? Is it the clue to some horrible trauma that twisted him to do this?"
"Don't start profiling on me, Merry; we've got people paid to do that."
"I'm just doing what you taught me, Lucy. Murder is like any skill; it doesn't fall out of the box perfect. This is perfect."
"The killer probably spent years fantasizing about this scene, Merry. They wanted, needed it to be perfect."
"But it never is. That's what serial killers say when the police interview them. Some of them try again and again for the real-life kill to match the fantasy, but it never does, so they kill again and again to try and make it perfect."
OKAY. STOP RIGHT THERE, YOUNG LADY. BACK THE FUCK UP. Let's just ignore that this is the very definition of a serial killer, and just look at the big picture.
I want to say someone's been watching too much Criminal Minds or CSI, I really do, but given how much LKH loves to tell us about how she wants the mundane world to be so very real-to-life, I have no doubt that she's done her research. I call into question just how much research she's done or how she uses it, but I don't doubt that she's hit the books and at least spoken to a couple of people associated with law enforcement. And this reeks of the author basically flashing all that knowledge she's gained. LOOK AT ALL THIS RESEARCH, LOOK AT ALL THIS STUFF I KNOW! SEE HOW COOL I AM TO KNOW THIS? IT MAKES THINGS REAL IN MY SILLY URBAN FANTASY STORY! And in the effort to show off all this really-real stuff that she's got notes on, she's cramming it into the scene where it's just not necessary. Now, she might think that the scene is better for it, but from a reader's perspective, the story suffers for it. I'm going to guess the story suffers a lot in this book, much like the reader does. There are better ways of incorporating research and having the heroine spout knowledge -- especially if this is knowledge she never previously had -- at someone is not it. It's clumsy and makes the heroine seem uppity and arrogant because she knows these things while the highly trained police detective frantically scribbles notes like this is a message from up on high.
On a side note, I desperately want the murderer in this story to have left the picture and other clues just to fuck with the police. But that would be clever and interesting and possibly hot, and this isn't allowed. Merry won't let us have nice things.
To really make matters worse, Lucy then goes to tell Merry, "You don't just rely on the magic; you actually try to be a good detective." Because Merry's just proved to be a shining star of observation and deduction so far. Merry then repeats the whole thing about how this scene is perfect and it shouldn't be, as serial killers don't suddenly pop up with the perfect crime, and then her dress wafts a bit (it's purple! we should care!) and Lucy apologises for calling Merry out on a Saturday. But apparently her boss has a new girlfriend, so he's unavailable. Right.
I'm still wondering why Merry doesn't have coveralls in her car for this sort of thing. Even Anita has enough sense for that sort of thing. I know this because there were a couple of scenes where Anita was happy to have found a skirt she can wear in them while working a scene. Whatever, this is a chance for some girl-talk about how everyone's weekend is now a bit ruined.
Hey, if you were wondering where the My Little Pony Men were, this is where we finally find out that Doyle and Frost (yes, he was turned into a stag - he got better) over by the car. For those interested: Doyle is still black all over, except for his earrings, and his hair is in a braid. Frost still has silver tinsel hair, all loose and floaty like some romance novel hero or, as Merry says, "looking like some model with a wind machine." And he's magically tangle-free. You know what? That actually sounds awesome. If you're going to be a bitchin' immortal hotass, you might as well have magically tangle and snarl-proof hair too. Never mind that Frost's hair is still ankle-length and is probably heavy as hell, specially in LA's temperatures, he's an immortal hotass. Your argument is invalid.
And now for a description of everyone else on the scene in their regular human clothes. Damn us for not being as pretty as faerie mens. And a rehash that Merry's worked with the police before, which is why she's allowed past the line and the boys are not.
"No murderer is this good the first time, or did you get a new flavor of killer while I was away in faerie?"
"Nope. Most murders are pretty standard. Violence level and victim differs but you're about eighty to ninety percent more likely to be killed by your nearest and dearest than by a stranger, and most killing is depressingly ordinary."
"This one's depressing," [Merry] said, "but it's not ordinary."
Yeah, because we hadn't established that the other two times it's been discussed in the space of ten minutes. Also, you'd think that the "faerie" would be capitalised, because it's not like you say, "oh dear, did you get a new kind of killer while I was in spain?" Not to mention, it would help differentiate between the magical-creature-faerie and magical-dimension-faerie. I'm just saying, as a puny human that is looked upon with such disdain from these people, it might help a bit with the interspecies communications and relations.
Merry offers to warn the local demi-fey about a potential serial killer stalking them, and this leads to a conversation about how some demi-fey can change their size from Barbie and Ken sized to short-person-sized, and then Lucy sees Merry out of the scene with a cheerful, "Enjoy your Saturday." But no! Merry is on the case! Going to the beach with her mens will have to wait because she's got this moral obligation to a) warn the demi-fey (because picking up a phone or sending one of the dudes is hard) and b) see if there's any magic in LA that can steal immortality. But to do it in such a way as to not cause a stir.
Then I realised that there wasn't a way. The fey were just like humans -- they understand fear. Some magic, a little near-immortality, doesn't make you un-afraid; it just gives you a different list of fears.
So, magical beings from a whole other magical universe, beings that do not age and some had the power to destroy and remake the world on a whim, beings that are as far from human as you can get with their knowledge and beauty, are at the heart of it just like everyone else. Riiight.
This is baaad! It's almost physically painful to read! I just want to go through it and rewrite it in English so it doesn't hurt so much! LKH has learned about the existence of semicolons and by goddess she's going to use them!
Not gonna lie, LKH is one of the reasons why I got to writing about faeries. Simply because I was so overwhelmed with this capslock rage of "I CAN DO BETTER THAN THIS!" It's nice to know that at least this is the consistent reaction out of me, and then I wind up writing deathfic for a few days. So this isn't entirely a bad thing for my productivity. Just my brain cells and sanity.
And lets hear it for those that love us! Me particularly. LOL! I am not going to burn the Anitapedia now. Someone I know pointed out, that lots of hard work went in to that so why not self publish since I have been waiting almost nine years. So I will.
I cannot put into words just how much I want this. Purely for science! And possibly FOR GREAT JUSTICE! Or at the very least Great Irony.
In other news, LKH has the first chapter of Divine Misdemeanours for download as a PDF on her website. Or, as LKH announced, "Divine Misdemeanors, who’s first chapter is up on our website." -- the book is a who now. And she wasn't lying when she said she got it straight from the publisher, because it's still in its raw formatting stage. Thankfully, those spelling errors that were in the first few paragraphs that she posted have been corrected. Well, "eucalyptus" is still a pronoun, but now Merry works for Grey Detective Agency: Supernatural Problems; Magical Solutions.
Now that I got your hopes up, I can dash them by revealing just how bad the writing still is even after editing.
Merry is at a crime scene. We know this because she's wearing a pretty, pretty dress and her hair is loose, but she can't tie it back because she's wearing latex gloves. Her life, so hard. All the other cops around can manage a small degree of professionalism, but none of them are totally legit faerie princesses!
On a side note: as someone who lives in a country full of eucalyptus trees...they're not spicy. At least, not to me. I have a shocking sense of smell, but gum trees smell zesty, or possibly lemon fresh-y to me, and it reminds me of cold medicine. I don't know, they might seem exotic to someone who isn't around them all the time, but given that Merry says that southern California is her home away from home...uh, she ought to be used to it? I'm confusing myself now.
If it had been this many adult human-sized bodies the Eucalyptus wouldn't have had a chance, but they weren't adult-sized.
I read this line via Twitter when LKH was teasing fandom with one sentence at a time, and I wanted to Tweet back to her, "are you talking about the trees being human-sized?" because that's how I read the sentence. And the more I look at it, the more I get O____o because it's...just...
Look, let's rewrite this: If there had been this many human-sized bodies, the smell of blood would have been overwhelming. Thankfully, the corpses were not human.
There, I fixed it for you. And for all I know, demi-fey smell like lavender and rainbows when they're dead. They're faeries.
There's a coy dance around saying "look, there's a bunch of demi-fey that are dead," by going through the agonising description that they were the size of dolls, but they were not dolls, and somehow their wings were frozen mid-motion (which does not make any sense if they're posed on their backs - unless their wings are propping them up? Which makes even less sense given how fragile butterfly/moth wings are), bouquets of wilted flowers still grasped in their tiny dead hands, and finally the whole thing like it's some graceful dance. So...dead people got served? They died in the middle of busting a move? Who's the unfortunate one stuck stirring the pot or raising the roof? Either the bad guy had a freeze-ray to accomplish this, or there was a lot of fiddling about with pipe cleaners to get them posed likes this. That is one dedicated bad guy.
Detective Lucy Tate turns up, and insert headdesking here.
[Lucy] was wearing a pants suit complete with a jacket and white button-up shirt that strained a little across the front because Lucy, like me, had too much figure for most button-up shirts. But I wasn't a police detective so I didn't have to pretend I was a man to try and fit in.
lkh_lashouts has had a field day over this so I'm not even going to rehash the indignation.
So, on with the show.
"They're laid out like something from a children's storybook down to the dancing poses and the flowers in their hands."
Lucy nodded. "It's not just like, it is."
"Is what?" [Merry] asked, looking at her.
...
Having read the chapter, the next part should be about a vital clue in the form of a page from a children's book that has an illustration just like the grisly scene before them. Instead, we get a paragraph waffling on about how Merry is both a detective and a faerie princess, and if she had only been one of these things (or neither), she would not be there. No, the vital clue comes after Merry's private me-time. Despite the page being in a plastic evidence cover-thing, and Merry wearing gloves, she still doesn't touch it for fear of contaminating the evidence or something equally dumb.
Merry points out that the bad guy had to bring the clothes the demi-fey are wearing, because they never would have worn anything like that outside of the Sithen. She knows this because she's seen them wear "three piece suits and formal evening wear." In LA weather? Okay. Lucy asks if they could have worn their current outfits out here anyway, and Merry says no, because "[t]hey wouldn't have matched perfectly without planning it this way."
"We were thinking he lured them down here with a promise of an acting part, a short film," [Lucy] said.
This is both hilarious and tragic (hilagic?) to me. This is LA! Everyone wants to be in the movies! Does anyone ever go to LA for any other reason?
UGH. LKH's fondness of defining things that people can either work out for themselves, or already know, now rears its head.
"The demi-fey, the small winged fey, have a particular fondness for natural circles."
"Explain."
"The stories only tell humans not to step into a ring of toadstools, or a ring of actual dancing fey, but it can be any natural circle. Flowers, stones, hills, or trees, like this circle. They come to dance in the circle."
I, the humble reader, am not stupid. Anyone that's stuck with the books this long is going to know this. Anyone who's never read a Merry Gentry book but knows that it's about faeries (and why wouldn't you? It's usually right there in the blurb), can probably work this out. And what's more, I'm pretty sure Lucy is not an idiot, otherwise she would not have made detective, and she's probably got some mean note-taking skills or at least a freakish memory in order to look this stuff up, specially if she's been dealing with faerie-related crime for a while. But no, all this pales in comparison of Merry's smarts and she's right there as a resource, so she might as well spout as much information as possible. This could be Lucy's very cunning plan to learn as much as she can in one hit and then exclude Merry from the rest of the investigation in case she screws things up, in which case I adore Lucy and I want to be her when I grow up as I would not have nearly so much grace in the face of such a moron, supernatural royal or otherwise.
There's a bit of a back and forth between Lucy and Merry as to what the possible motive of the bad guy could be. Lucy thinks the bad guy lured the demi-fey out there with the promise of a bit-part in a short movie, but it's also possible that the guy was stalking the demi-fey if they frequented this particular clearing. If it's the former, then there's more leads for the police to track down and thus less use for Merry around, but if it's the latter...well, it's harder to be a detective of any kind. I'm sorry, I had no idea that solving crime was more about looking at what might be easier to investigate rather than finding out what happened.
Then Lucy says, "Don't say he. You don't know the killer is a he." (which seems weird because she's the one that referred to the Big Bad as a "he" in the first place, and never mind that statistically there are more male serial killers than female) and Merry agrees and asks if the police assume the killer is human. Her reasoning is that humans are not strong or fast enough to do this. Also, we finally get a cause of death -- the demi-fey had their throats slit. Lucy asks if the demi-fey are as fragile as they look, and Merry says no and repeats that they're fast. However, she has to concede that with some magic, a human could do this to them. When asked what kind of magic someone might need, Merry replies:
"I don't have a spell in mind. I'm not human. I don't need spells to use against other fey, but I know there are stories of magic that can make us weak, catchable, and hurtable."
Right, so back in book two when Merry had to use the fertility ritual for Maeve, that had no spell component to it at all. Admittedly, I haven't read beyond Mistral's Kiss, so there's probably been some patches to Merry's Princess app that I'm missing. I am purposely overlooking the "catchable and hurtable" thing just so I don't give myself an anneurism.
Merry goes off into screen saver mode while she monologues internally about lesser fey dying from mundane causes like falling down the stairs, and immortality isn't what it used to be. Goddamnit, I hate it when we import cheap immortality knockoffs even if they do look very, very shiny.
For once, a character in the story notices the glassy-eyed, head-tilted heroine and calls her on it. Lucy kinda snaps Merry out of it and Merry pleads a severe case of "I'm not used to Seeing Dead People (tm)." before finally answering the question that yes, demi-fey were meant to be immortal. If this were CSI, we'd have Horatio make his pun by now, slide his glasses back in place and we'd be rocking to The Who. But no, we're not done with the internal monologuing yet. Lucy asks how the killer manage this -- look, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say the killer slit their throats, but what do I know? I'm not a faerie princess -- and Merry goes on about how this one time at band camp, an Unseelie noble used a cold iron blade to kill a demi-fey. And the court had killed him.
AHAHA.
We'd killed the sidhe who did it, although he said that he hadn't mean to kill her. He had just meant to wound her through the heart as her desertion of him had wounded his heart -- poetic and the kind of romantic drivel you get when you're used to being surrounded by beings who can have their heads chopped off and still live.
I can just see this guy waving a knife around all, "OOPS, MY BAD. I ONLY MEANT TO KILL HER A LITTLE BIT. YOU THINK SHE'LL TAKE ME BACK?"
Anyway, back to the case at hand. Merry does not think a sidhe did this as it "had the taste of something much more convoluted than that -- a motive that only the killer would understand." I don't know about you, but I'd think that being a detective would mean trying to figure that part out and, like, detect the killer. I could be over-thinking this.
I looked carefully at my own reasoning to make certain I wasn't talking myself out of the Unseelie Court, the Darkling Throng, being suspects. The court that I had been offered rulership of and given up for love.
I would love to see an Unseelie try to say something like, "Princess Meredith, we offer you rulership of our Dark Court," with a straight face. It might be a drinking game -- see who can get the furthest through the declaration before cracking up, the loser has to buy the next round. It's entertainment for the whole family.
But whatever, this is an excuse for Merry to break out the "woe is me" card and reflect upon how people died, y'all, some she even killed herself, and that "Love had just been the emotion that had led me to what I truly wanted, and who I truly was."
Lucy has to snap Merry out of it again, and we're back to being dumb.
"What are you thinking, Merry?"
"I'm thinking that I wonder what emotion led the killer to do this, to want to do this."
"What do you mean?"
"It takes something like love to put this much attention into the details. Did the killer love this book or did he love the small fey? Did he hate this book as a child? Is it the clue to some horrible trauma that twisted him to do this?"
"Don't start profiling on me, Merry; we've got people paid to do that."
"I'm just doing what you taught me, Lucy. Murder is like any skill; it doesn't fall out of the box perfect. This is perfect."
"The killer probably spent years fantasizing about this scene, Merry. They wanted, needed it to be perfect."
"But it never is. That's what serial killers say when the police interview them. Some of them try again and again for the real-life kill to match the fantasy, but it never does, so they kill again and again to try and make it perfect."
OKAY. STOP RIGHT THERE, YOUNG LADY. BACK THE FUCK UP. Let's just ignore that this is the very definition of a serial killer, and just look at the big picture.
I want to say someone's been watching too much Criminal Minds or CSI, I really do, but given how much LKH loves to tell us about how she wants the mundane world to be so very real-to-life, I have no doubt that she's done her research. I call into question just how much research she's done or how she uses it, but I don't doubt that she's hit the books and at least spoken to a couple of people associated with law enforcement. And this reeks of the author basically flashing all that knowledge she's gained. LOOK AT ALL THIS RESEARCH, LOOK AT ALL THIS STUFF I KNOW! SEE HOW COOL I AM TO KNOW THIS? IT MAKES THINGS REAL IN MY SILLY URBAN FANTASY STORY! And in the effort to show off all this really-real stuff that she's got notes on, she's cramming it into the scene where it's just not necessary. Now, she might think that the scene is better for it, but from a reader's perspective, the story suffers for it. I'm going to guess the story suffers a lot in this book, much like the reader does. There are better ways of incorporating research and having the heroine spout knowledge -- especially if this is knowledge she never previously had -- at someone is not it. It's clumsy and makes the heroine seem uppity and arrogant because she knows these things while the highly trained police detective frantically scribbles notes like this is a message from up on high.
On a side note, I desperately want the murderer in this story to have left the picture and other clues just to fuck with the police. But that would be clever and interesting and possibly hot, and this isn't allowed. Merry won't let us have nice things.
To really make matters worse, Lucy then goes to tell Merry, "You don't just rely on the magic; you actually try to be a good detective." Because Merry's just proved to be a shining star of observation and deduction so far. Merry then repeats the whole thing about how this scene is perfect and it shouldn't be, as serial killers don't suddenly pop up with the perfect crime, and then her dress wafts a bit (it's purple! we should care!) and Lucy apologises for calling Merry out on a Saturday. But apparently her boss has a new girlfriend, so he's unavailable. Right.
I'm still wondering why Merry doesn't have coveralls in her car for this sort of thing. Even Anita has enough sense for that sort of thing. I know this because there were a couple of scenes where Anita was happy to have found a skirt she can wear in them while working a scene. Whatever, this is a chance for some girl-talk about how everyone's weekend is now a bit ruined.
Hey, if you were wondering where the My Little Pony Men were, this is where we finally find out that Doyle and Frost (yes, he was turned into a stag - he got better) over by the car. For those interested: Doyle is still black all over, except for his earrings, and his hair is in a braid. Frost still has silver tinsel hair, all loose and floaty like some romance novel hero or, as Merry says, "looking like some model with a wind machine." And he's magically tangle-free. You know what? That actually sounds awesome. If you're going to be a bitchin' immortal hotass, you might as well have magically tangle and snarl-proof hair too. Never mind that Frost's hair is still ankle-length and is probably heavy as hell, specially in LA's temperatures, he's an immortal hotass. Your argument is invalid.
And now for a description of everyone else on the scene in their regular human clothes. Damn us for not being as pretty as faerie mens. And a rehash that Merry's worked with the police before, which is why she's allowed past the line and the boys are not.
"No murderer is this good the first time, or did you get a new flavor of killer while I was away in faerie?"
"Nope. Most murders are pretty standard. Violence level and victim differs but you're about eighty to ninety percent more likely to be killed by your nearest and dearest than by a stranger, and most killing is depressingly ordinary."
"This one's depressing," [Merry] said, "but it's not ordinary."
Yeah, because we hadn't established that the other two times it's been discussed in the space of ten minutes. Also, you'd think that the "faerie" would be capitalised, because it's not like you say, "oh dear, did you get a new kind of killer while I was in spain?" Not to mention, it would help differentiate between the magical-creature-faerie and magical-dimension-faerie. I'm just saying, as a puny human that is looked upon with such disdain from these people, it might help a bit with the interspecies communications and relations.
Merry offers to warn the local demi-fey about a potential serial killer stalking them, and this leads to a conversation about how some demi-fey can change their size from Barbie and Ken sized to short-person-sized, and then Lucy sees Merry out of the scene with a cheerful, "Enjoy your Saturday." But no! Merry is on the case! Going to the beach with her mens will have to wait because she's got this moral obligation to a) warn the demi-fey (because picking up a phone or sending one of the dudes is hard) and b) see if there's any magic in LA that can steal immortality. But to do it in such a way as to not cause a stir.
Then I realised that there wasn't a way. The fey were just like humans -- they understand fear. Some magic, a little near-immortality, doesn't make you un-afraid; it just gives you a different list of fears.
So, magical beings from a whole other magical universe, beings that do not age and some had the power to destroy and remake the world on a whim, beings that are as far from human as you can get with their knowledge and beauty, are at the heart of it just like everyone else. Riiight.
This is baaad! It's almost physically painful to read! I just want to go through it and rewrite it in English so it doesn't hurt so much! LKH has learned about the existence of semicolons and by goddess she's going to use them!
Not gonna lie, LKH is one of the reasons why I got to writing about faeries. Simply because I was so overwhelmed with this capslock rage of "I CAN DO BETTER THAN THIS!" It's nice to know that at least this is the consistent reaction out of me, and then I wind up writing deathfic for a few days. So this isn't entirely a bad thing for my productivity. Just my brain cells and sanity.