Lire works for the police pro-bono – and as the most
powerful touch-psychic in the area, she’s definitely a major asset. Unfortunately,
prejudice and superstition make it hard to convince others to accept that,
especially Detective Vince Vanelli. She has enough problems navigating in a
world where touch is a constant peril, without having to babysit the chip on
his shoulder
There’s a serial killer on the loose and she’s determined
to help catch him especially when one of the victims hits so close to home. She
pushes far further than is wise – both taxing her powers and rising the ire of
an secret organisation that has a lot of power to make life difficult; but can
Lire really risk the killer killing again?
When I picked up this book I saw it was about a psychic
helping the police I was interested, but expected something I’d seen before –
after all, a psychometric reading information from evidence, or any psychic
helping the police isn’t new.
And there were a lot of concepts I’ve seen before – but this
goes to show that a concept doesn’t have to be completely new to be awesome.
Because while I’ve seen them before, I don’t think I’d seen them as well done as
I have here. The information that Lire gets from touching things is really well
done – as is the peril of her touching things without realising. The way she
can get overwhelmed is really well done – as well as the worry over the subject
matter – how can you go around touching things involved in a murder without
seeing and experiencing truly horrendously traumatic images and events? Or,
what if you touch someone who themselves is a terrible person and you absorb
their entire experience and mind set? It’s really well written to really bring
home the power of these visions and how they can affect the psychic’s mental
health.
On top of that, the world building has been developed
beyond these concepts – so we have a psychic who gets impressions from touching
things? We often see that, are giving a dash of tragedy and move on but this
book takes it to the next level. What does that mean? How does this psychic
eat? How do they drink? How do they wash their clothes or buy furniture or
sleep in a hotel? Since animals also leave impressions, can they even eat meat?
This is where this book excels – it takes the basic concepts but develops it
and makes it real with the detail and all the little elements that we generally
don’t think about but have to be considered.
I also love how it’s developed into an actual marketable
skill – authenticating antiques or providing information for historians is an
excellent twist I’ve never come across before.
I’ve rambled on about this world building of the psychics
for a while and it probably gives a terrible impression that there are lots of
infodumps in this book – but there isn’t. It actually flows wonderfully with
all these elements of the world naturally incorporated into Lire’s experience.
Also she has an undead necromantic possessed teddy bear which manages neither to be twee nor ridiculous. How can this not be a good thing?
What did, I think, drag the book down a little wasn’t the
world building or the writing both of which were excellently integrated, but
the plot. I loved the plot – I loved all of the plots. I just don’t think we
needed plots, plural, in the first book of a series. We had the serial killer
plot that was a good story, it was an exciting plot, it had lots of information
to chew on, was an excellent way to get to know the world, establish the characters
and the way magic works and give us lots of exciting action and baffling
mystery as well. This story was excellent, well written and good fun.
I like the plot of the secret society, the terrifying
realisation of what power psychics could have, how utterly defenceless Lire
feels in the face of them and the steps she has to take to hold them off as she
learns more about them coupled with more revelations about Vince, the cop she
works with – that’s a great storyline and well written.
I wasn’t a huge fan of the romance between her and Vince
because it just seemed so inevitably. I’d rather something develop over several
books rather than her leaping in so quickly – it felt a little like “my woo-woo
says yes! RAWR LOVE!”. Similarly, I’d have liked more work on her powers before
we started to pull out the super special woo-woo routine.
I liked most of these stories and loved a couple of them –
but they didn’t all need to be in the same book along with the huge and rich
world building and the extremely good character development. It was too much
and there were moments in the book where I thought it had finished and realised
there were still pages left to read as another plot emerged from the depths
Ok, marginalised issues – firstly let’s look at the
analogies:
All of Lire’s issues with being a psychic makes for an
excellent disability analogy – the need for accommodations, people around her
constantly not understanding the accommodations she needs, even those
accommodations becoming fashionable frippery of people who don’t share her
abilities – they’re making a nonsense health statement over what she needs to
actually survive and function- it’s all done extremely well and fully fleshed
out. Of course, I’m not particularly happy with analogies (I tend to find
minority analogies are far too often used as a replacement for actual inclusion
– and there are no disabled people in this book) but at least it’s an analogy
that goes into proper detail and weight to create a fully plausible and nuanced
depiction beyond a clumsy grabbing of a real life issue and drawing parallels
that don’t quite work.
The same can be said of the way anti-magic prejudice was displayed,
especially within families, interaction with police and bringing in some of its
own unique elements: the police are willing to use her powers, but not really
believing in them. Which means she now has Suspicious Knowledge of the crimes
and has to deal with an extra level of problems but also means she has to keep
proving herself to the police to prove her value which means riskier readings.
A lot of it is done well and, as with the disability analogy, there’s a lot of
effort to create a full and rounded marginalisation rather than drawing clumsy
comparisons – but it’s all undermined by the fact Lire DOES have an intrusive
power and many psychics and magic users are, of course, extremely dangerous
which is always a problem when appropriating
marginalised issues (I also wonder sometimes if when authors make up the
laws they’ve made for their persecuted magical beings they realise that they’re
actually granting them more legal protections than actual marginalised people
have? In this book, psychics who can melt your face have more legal protections
than LGBT people).
Lire is an excellent female character with a number of a
good, developed, non-demonised women around her (even her mother and sister are
humanised) and a female best friend who isn’t just there to serve Lire. Which makes
Monica, the sexy receptionist who is there to be slut shamed just seem out of
place; I don’t really see the need for this tiny random character to be
introduced to be scorned for her clothes and make up. Unfortunately, there aren’t
actually many minorities; we have Veronica a Black woman who runs an auction
house who likes like great fun but since she’s not related to the plot we don’t
see her for more than a chapter. We also have an Asian agent with psychic
powers who appears for a couple of scenes. Lire lives next to “two gay psychics”.
We never see them or hear anything else about them (gay Maris!) and
I’m frankly bemused at the idea they were referenced at all, let alone that
their sexuality was rammed in so clumsily. It’d be like introducing someone as
your gay friend.
I need to return in the conclusion to saying how good
this book is because I want to hammer home how much I enjoyed it. Other than marginalised
issues, my main beef with this book is it tried to cram too much awesome into
one book and that much awesome needs to be spread around to make it awesomer.
Yes, it’s a word. I said so. It’s well written, has several great storylines,
has some excellent characters and a truly wonderful world – it just needs to
unpack a little.
