People are going missing and have been for some time – seemingly
without a trace until some jawbones were found. But they’re too old – they definitely
match the victims but are years older than they should be.
Woo-woo is afoot and between the changing age of the bones and troll involvement, all clues point to fairy land, and the dangerous and alien goblin market. Clearly careful, subtle investigation is needed.
Such a shame that James and Greg don’t do subtle or careful.
I liked this book. It was fun. It had some hilarious
moments, it had some pretty exciting moments. It had action and adventure and
weirdness writ large. The story was fun, it covered a huge swath of the world,
it brought up some interesting points about the relationship between the worlds
and gave the characters some room to grow. It had a lot of good there
And it had a lot of, well, basically a whacky romp
through fairy land. The guys (backed up to a lesser extent by the supporting
cast) rampage their way through “investigation” which involves breaking things
and hitting things until answers fall on them or people given them answers just
to make them go away and stop causing trouble. This is a form of “investigation”
that annoys me so much in Urban Fantasy and I was getting a little irritated
with it here – except it was blatantly lamp shaded. James openly admits that his
plan is basically to hit things and hope he finds answers doing it and it is
presented as exactly as silly as it sounds. And it doesn’t work. Oh they make
some progress but at nearly every step of the way of their “let’s rampage and
get answers” they run into something bigger, stronger or smarter than them that
is less inclined to tolerate their nonsense. The greatest challenge of the book
is fought through the mind and not with vampire might. Sabrina is there to
provide sense and rescue and they rely heavily on the patronage of the fairy
queen they earned in the past to dig themselves out of the foolish hole they’ve
dug
They do get answers, some of those answers do come from
their whacky and ill advised rampage. But that rampage is always very clear as
being ill advised. Especially compared to the very efficient investigation they
perform later (though I do think that Greg’s computer skills are morphing into
a slightly ridiculous Deus Ex).
The problem is that a large part of the book is a rampage
through fairy land (and I’m not a fan of fairy land in this series anyway, it
feels like an excuse for the author to just throw every random thing into the
story). It wasn’t a bad storyline, but it also didn’t add a whole lot of
anything and didn’t exactly thrill me.
