The Ledberg Runestone (The Jonah Heywood Chronicles #1) by Patrick Donovan

Jonah Heywood is a shaman and a grifter, just scraping by -barely able to pay his ever spiralling booze bill

Which is a problem when you owe a large sum of money to a loan shark quite willing to break every bone in your body then move on to your family.

So when a woman approaches him with a deal he knows he shouldn’t take, a job he should avoid and a magical artefact he knows he wants no part of; he has to say yes

Jonah Heywood is a character that makes a lot of terrible decisions and he’s pretty unique for that

At which I hear you all yell “but you complain constantly about characters making terrible decisions!!!” Which is true - but in those cases I’m complaining about a character making terrible decisions that no-one - least of all the author - is willing to acknowledge as such. This isn’t a protagonist leaping blindly through portals or conducting one person searches of all Siberia - and succeeding. This is a protagonist making bad decisions which are constantly acknowledged: in fact so much of the plot ran simply because Jonah makes bad decisions which constantly put him in bad situations and leave him with further few good options.

Jonah is an alcoholic. He is in debt and making terrible choices to get out of debt. He is traumatised and not dealing well - or at all - with his traumatic past. He is making the worst enemies in the worst ways and generally just about everything he does I want to yell “STOP! STOP!”. But this isn’t like so many books we’ve read because - because the book is written to EXPECT me to say “stop”. At no point am I expected to agree with Jonah’s choices. At very least every time near-constantly drunk Jonah gets behind the wheel of a car I cringe.

And there’s a really nice balance between Jonah doing terrible things because he has not real choice while at the same time Jonah simply not making good choices: largely because he is in utter denial of where he is (especially in relation to his alcoholism) and in utter denial of the fact He Needs Help. Jonah needs an intervention. Jonah needs a keeper.

I want to route for Jonah. But not for him to win but for him to LEARN. I don’t want or need him to be awesome - I need him to be better; I don’t want him to ascend to be the all powerful one, I want him to put his life together. I want him to sort himself out.

And this is interesting to me because in the opening lines of this book I was sure I knew what this story would be - from the starting in a bar, hard drinking, war wounded, cynical with a woman coming in - who even if she wasn’t DESCRIBED that way you mentally call “dame”. The hyper-powered, hard bitten noir-ish: the Harry Dresden, the Yancey Lazarus, the Remy Chandler (and I won’t lie, I LOVE that whole schtick. Yes yes I do) but then for it to surprise me by turning what I expected to be a hyper-powerful over-the-top character into, perhaps, what that cynic, hard-bitten character would ACTUALLY look like was really an interesting twist. And I found myself really loving that

Side note here: it feels almost like whoever edited this book skipped the first few pages. The writing is actually inexcusably terrible, it’s long winded, convoluted, the dialogue is comic when read aloud, it’s super repetitive (with different characters all quirking eyebrows at each other) and I wrote loads of notes about the abysmal text… but that fades really quickly. I’m not sure why the first few pages skipped editing but it’s worth it to hang on in there.

And Jonah isn’t hyper powerful either. He has magic - he’s a shaman who has some nifty tricks up his sleeve but he is far from dangerous and mighty and definitely not a heavy weight. His magic nicely fits into the world building which is really nicely hinted at in this book (i really love the depiction of spirits here) but there’s more a foundation for more to come. For a story all about a shaman stealing a magical artefact from an all-powerful voodoo Mambo at the behest of a near god it’s all quite mundane.

The plot itself is fun - not unique in and of itself: it’s a classic find the Maltese Falcon plot line. We have twists and an exceptional one at the end; but what holds it together is this unique character and the foundations it lays for something truly epic to come.

The biggest powerful force in this book is a Black woman and her family - she’s extremely powerful but also clearly good. And that is important for any practitioner of voodoo since it’s so often demonised in the media. She is compassionate, even in opposition to Jonah and while she doesn’t play a huge role; she clearly represents the road not taken: the Sensible Choice. Also I think she’s going to be a major element of this series far more so.

We do have a gay character - and in some ways it’s excellent that he does have his life together despite very similar origins and obstacles to Jonah. He is what Jonah could have been with a life, a partner (albeit one never seen) and the ability to help others. But the flip side of this is he appears only when Jonah needs help. He’s Jonah’s greatest friend and he literally only appears when Jonah needs saving, a bed, a ride, someone to clean up after him: this is the very essence of a tokened trope. I want to see him have a life and I want a friendship which goes both ways. Similarly the only women in the book who isn’t his fridged dead sister or a quasi antagonist is a woman Jonah’s playing Saviour to. I’d like to see a woman who Jonah a) isn’t afraid of b) doesn’t need saving and c) has died tragically to give him trauma.

Jonah is a disabled man - he’s an alcoholic, has a lot of unresolved trauma and he has a disabled leg - and it actually affects him. I’ve seen a few characters who are described as having a bad leg - and then they promptly start sprinting, break dancing and setting new records in the triple jump… but not Jonah.

This book has introduced an excellent, new character with a very different focus to many in the genre, an interesting world and a promise of a whole lot of epic coming

Demon Hunts by (Walker Papers #5) C.E. Murphy

Joanne and Billy are now the woo-woo team – the pair with supernatural abilities who help with those cases that are just too weird for anyone else. So when people show up dying and partially eaten but without a scrap of any kind of forensic evidence on the bodies, it’s time to call them in.

But even magic can’t work miracles and there’s a limit to what even they can sense, much to their frustration. What they do learn is that their enemy is far more dangerous than they imagined and is going to take some… unorthodox messages to track and stop

Thankfully, Joanne is pretty good at unorthodox methods – as she proves not only to the people around her but also to Coyote, her mentor, finally free from a supernatural coma. In his absence Joanne has grown considerable and they have to refind their balance with what she’s learned, how she’s grown, the path she is on – and the fact they’re both in the real world, in the flesh.

It’s another fun mystery – with a lot evolved. The progression in how the police force treats Joanne and Billy has excellently developed through the series to Morrison now overtly recognising them as his woo-woo experts. The mystery itself is interesting and, while it is quickly solved in terms of “whodunnit” the how to stop it part of the story maintains some excellent tension and questions to keep the story going. The story is really well paced without any lags or moments of boredom, confusion, or vast leaps of logic. But the star of this book has to be the characterisations

I really love the introduction of Coyote, and I really thought I wouldn’t. I expected his presence to shake his mystique and it did. But it did it extremely well because it not only humanised him but helped Joanne to grow. Coyote is a person. He’s more knowledgeable than Joanne, in many ways more capable and Joanne and has powers and skills Joanne can’t touch.

But he is a person and he isn’t god. There are areas where Joanne is better suited than him, there are areas where Joanne is more powerful than him and there are things she can do which he cannot. And him showing up didn’t turn this into a story that focuses on Coyote, Joanne is still the protagonist, she is still the one investigating, she is still the one in charge and the one who makes the decision in her city and her life. I liked that it made it really clear that they can be powerful in different ways and walk different path. That Coyote, healer, teacher, advisor has far greater strengths in those areas – but Joanne doesn’t have to follow the same way; she’s a warrior, a defender, a soldier who heals things and makes things better in her own way. I liked that he had his precious philosophy that was truly valuable to him – but at the same time it was acknowledge he could have that and not need Joanne to follow it.

To me this is especially important given how much Joanne has grown and learned over the last few books. She needs a mentor, not a boss and not a character to remind her how much she doesn’t know, how new she is and how weak she is. After what she has achieved in the series, she has proved her worth and her capability even if she has made mistakes and caused problems in the past, she has also gone on to fix them. She needs a peer, not a school teacher and it was really well written to give her that.

Another element that impressed me was the emphasis on Joanne being a healer - even while she’s a warrior and even while hunting a “monster.” There is always a willingness to be sympathetic to the enemy even while being prepared to kick its arse and stab it until it stops moving. Even while knowing it has to be stopped, Joanne can still sympathise with the pain the Wendigo feels

Also we have a Wendigo which is actually a Wendigo which has at least a nod to the actual legends of a Wendigo rather than just being a fancy werewolf you have to kill with fire as we see so much in this genre. There was some depth behind it. This is something this series does well – the creatures, the realms, the legends have had some research behind them, there’s some work to present the legends as they actually were, their beliefs as they are actually held and not just raid random cultures for any spare monsters they have around. It’s detailed, it’s deep and it’s fascinating. However, I still have a minor complaint that it’s also damn confusing at times. The writing can become very abstract, very confused and very lost especially as Joanne travels from realm to realm to realm. It’s a lot tighter than it has been in previous books and it’s a definite improvement but it is still an issue.

The Walker Papers have some of my favourite characters in the genre. Joanne herself has a lot of depth from her mixed heritage, rather than it being there of convenient woo-woo (though it is a constant source of the latter). She recognises her conflict outsider feeling with her mother’s Irish family and her father’s Native American family (it’s neatly done in one line – who she always thought of herself as deathly pale compared to her father’s family but going to her mother’s funeral she realised how much darker she was than her relatives). She has steadily grown and grown to accept both elements of her heritage and marrying them together without running from both as she had – even down to her very name; changing Siobahn Walkingstick to Joanne Walker.