These are real potato chip books: You can't have just one. There are three so far with a fourth book due out in March. (Thank goodness – I don't want to wait too long!)by Seanan McGwire
They are (so far):
Rosemary and Rue
A Local Habitation
An Artificial Night
The titles all come from Shakespeare and we are entering a modern version of the world of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." October Daye is a changeling - in Seanan McGuire's books a changeling is of mixed human and faerie parentage. When the time came for her to choose worlds - she chose her mother's people. Her mother is pureblood Daoine Sidhe. As a halfblood, October (nickname: Toby) has some of their gifts - the main gift of the Daoine Sidhe is for blood magic. You meet a lot of different faerie folk in these books and even when the names of the races of faerie are familiar, I do not know enough about them to judge how much is traditional and how much McGuire has changed for her own versions.
When we meet Toby she is on a stake-out. She has used her blood magic gifts to become a successful p.i. She is also a knight in the court of her local faerie lord Sylvester Torquill. I started the book and there she is on a stake out and her husband calls and she talks to her daughter and I thought, "how nice, a p.i. with a normal family life." Of course, this was doomed. And the rest of the book deals with her dealing with the results of that first chapter. (See - trying not to spoil!)
Having read the books in quick succession, I noticed that Toby seems to become more and more entrenched in the world of faerie in each book. And we learn a little bit more about her background in each book. There are things about her life that even Toby doesn't know the whole truth about and based on the little sneak peek chapter at the end of An Artificial Night - it appears that we are going to go deeper into it soon.
I love the mixture of magic and detective fiction. That's why I love the Dresden Files - both the books and the tv show (oh how I miss Paul Blackthorne as Harry Dresden - sigh) and this is a nice mixture of the two genres. If you enjoy that mix: definitely try these books.
Seanan McGuire is an urban fatasy writer, and also writes modern horror under pen name of Mira Grant
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