BR Kingsolver

RB is a powerful telepath and a private detective, working outside the clans on a series of mundane cases, often finding cheating spouses.

But outside the clans doesn’t mean she has no ties to them and when a young druid is kidnapped – one among many, she is the one that Lord O’Byrne turns to to investigate.

The trail leads across Europe to a huge human trafficking network of vulnerable women – and uncovers tensions that may start a war between the clans

So much good to say here.

Let’s show more start with the world. A world with a huge hidden population of Telepaths – with varying gifts. Some of those gifts produces druids – or succubi (with lots of history explaining this odd link). And by varying gifts – our protagonist, RB has 15 separate ones and I get the impression she doesn’t even have a quarter of them so there’s huge scope for “varying” under that umbrella. The Telepath clans are woven into our history in a way that draws on it and explains their current affiliations, enmities and ongoing issues but doesn’t appropriate it (for example, the Clans are very involved in World War 2 but never said to be responsible for it) but with the odd name drop implying certain famous people are Telepaths in ways that work without being skeevy (like the Medici family for example) and just make me further appreciate the integration. The world is huge and awesome.

The plot is really fast paced and wide. It has a lot of elements all of which are inter-related and draw on each other as RB sees the conspiracy she’s facing grow every wider and more complex as the human trafficking she’s exploring becomes Europe wide and related to various clan plots. Despite that, RB is excellently focused on her goals among the temptation to bloat elsewhere. The action is really well written, the story is extremely fast paced – the race to find and save a girl, the many leads they have to chase down all feel both realistic and exciting; from the excitement of a new lead to the disappointment of another route blocked, it carries you along.

I love the main characters. She’s powerful without her super-woo-woo being her defining feature. She’s blessedly free of angst. She gets on with other women and doesn’t have any of those insta-hate moment. She’s sexual without it completely overwhelming the story. Her main assets, despite all of her super powerful magic and her supernatural beauty, is actually her brain and detective skills. She has familial support despite her estranged father, she has a community, she has a life and she’s happy about it. It’s kind of sad how rare all of these elements are and how refreshing it is to have a protagonist who combines all of them.

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I loved the gritty borderline dystopian corporately controlled world.
I enjoyed reading about an MC who didn't cry herself to sleep for weeks after killing a rapist or murderer in self-defense for once.
While the book is brutally honest at times and doesn't try to sugarcoat anything, I appreciated that it doesn't wallow in the pain and suffering unnecessarily with this almost sadistic glee like most darker books do.

There is a weird dichotomy between the MC being selfless and heart-warmingly show more sweet but at the same time a stone-cold killer without any regrets even if her victims might not have deserved what they got.
This contrast makes the MC appear extremely callous sometimes even though I wouldn't have given it a second thought if she wasn't also a goodie-two-shoes at times.
Both, her selflessness and strong motivation to help the destitute, as well as her work as a literal assassin, become unbelievable when considered in the context of each other.
She seems to arbitrarily switch between being an "everyone deserves a second chance" kind of attitude and her just murdering people left and right without a second thought.

Beyond that, the MC is just completely OP. She ends up in a few dicey situations in later books that she can't just shrug herself out of but she never gets confronted with something that even came close to feeling actually dangerous to her.
If you are aversed to overpowered multi-talents that border on mary sue you will not enjoy this book.

This lead to a general lack of suspense which caused me to frequently space out and having to rewind the audiobook, and even then I am not sure I didn't miss entire paragraphs every now and then without ever noticing.
I am reluctant to write that it doesn't have depth because it feels like a huge amount of work went into constructing the plots, and a few relationships which are important to the MC get developed well later on. But on the other hand, the absurdly strong abilities of the MC trivialize and devalue all that effort in a way. It's a bit like you just managed to knot the gordian knot riddle and then some bitch ass alexander guy comes along and just chops it open with his sword. show less

This was an interesting one.
It's packed full of flaws but it is different enough that I enjoyed it nonetheless.

While this book initially seems like it is made from the same mold as 99% of all UF/PNR, it doesn't follow those templates at all.

The world appears to have a huge scale and is full of intricate complexity but we never learn anything about it beyond an incredibly superficial level, at least not in the first two books.

The author wants her main character to be everything at once. show more Incredibly strong unique abilities, genius-level smart, street smart, hacker-guru, out-going, tough, brave, and sassy but at the same time she is supposed to be vulnerable, naive, introverted, and withdrawn, and all that.
Basically, all aspects that could possibly make an MC interesting are combined in this one person which makes absolutely zero sense.

This is kind of the theme of the series in general as well. It's just a mess comprised of a huge number of fantasy, sci-fi, and UF tropes. We got every supernatural race ever written about as well as more modern takes on supernaturals. The time period is a mix of 23d century sci-fi, modern time UF, and medieval fantasy all at once.

The book takes no time to explore anything in detail. The pacing is relentlessly pushing forward non-stop.
You know how sometimes books have these fast-forward sections in which we shallowly pass over a section of time to wrap a story up or to get to the climax? At least 80% of the first two books in this series are written in this fast-forward style as if we are rattling off a checklist as fast as possible.
I am not even sure if this can be labeled as pacing issues because it's not really the pace that's the problem.
There isn't anything there that could be paced because we just skip over everything no brakes.
To be fair this problem is far worse in the second book because the first book is willing to give us at least some time to get acclimatized to the world. But even in the first book, we get introduced to new characters constantly to the point that I had to deliberately focus on remembering them all. And it's not a case of throwaway characters. Almost all of them reappear later on and play various different roles throughout the story even if they initially seem like extras.

One last complaint I have is about the technology they have and how nobody seems to use it.
They have access to so much insane Clark-tech every single one of which should've fundamentally transformed society in a very profound way (and we are not even talking about what the magic can apparently do) but it's basically just 21st-century society with a little more electricity and a few dumb robots here and there. This in particular makes the entire world feel superficial.

So, in conclusion, even though I have many things to criticize in this series, I enjoyed the fresh wind because it is so far from the mind-numbingly boring same-old-same-old. show less

This one was very different than what I usually read in this genre.
It almost seems like the author delights in subverting expectations and clicheés.

The protagonists are refreshingly uncompromising and people just die in conflicts.
While being a nice change of pace this also leads to a few problems.
Many characters seem to be very blasé about tragedy and death.
This problem is confounded by the audiobook narrator because she emphasizes this blaséness.
I think a narrator trying to counteract show more this problem would've gone a long way to dampen that impression.
One of the causes for this impression is the breakneck pacing of this book.
I've never read a book that is paced so fast from front to back, its dizzying.
There is just no time for emotional impact. It's almost like the author had a maximum word count target.
This clashes in a few scenes with supposed war trauma the mc still suffers from.
By setting the anchor of emotional involvement to basically zero the few times the aftermath of these traumatic experiences come up they seem almost melodramatic and out of place.

By rushing through the plot at this breakneck speed we get a look at a lot of different aspects of the world but because there is never enough time for more than a glimpse. It is hard to tell how consistent the world-building actually is.

The next paragraph might be considered a light spoiler but I believe it doesn't spoil anything relevant.
A pretty important element, later on, is the US government and its structure but sadly how it is portrayed is incredibly naive and stupid. There are lots of single points of failure that the bad guys want to exploit. A government built like that, in reality, could probably be toppled by a few teenagers. It's an alternative world, I get it, but no government could possibly exist with a naive structure to that extent. Just research the public part of how the actual US government security structure is built to get a clue of how bad this really is.

I really enjoyed how different this book is from the beaten path of UF but it could've done with an additional 100 or so pages as well as a less gullible government structure but the latter probably would've thrown a pretty big wrench into the main plot. show less