Books – Black Magic Woman
Jun. 17th, 2012 10:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a_cubedAlmost caught up on the backlog of book blogging. The three books so far in this series are, I think, the only outstanding ones.
This is another modern day urban fantasy of the veil sub-type, i.e. the supernatural exists but is not acknowledged generally. It’s the start of a series of “Morris and Chastain Investigations”. Its basic conceit is that Quincey Morris’ (the American in Dracula) descendents are battlers against evil magic. His friend Chastain is a white witch. There’s a little bit of sexual tension, unrelieved. This is definitely not paranormal romance. There’s an interesting “Hero of another story” in Barry White, a New York-based Barry Love, who they run into at one point.
In parallel with the main storyline, there’s an interesting alternate linekd tale of an FBI agent and a South African visiting cop on the trail of a serial killer. This is an intricately linked sub-plot and the FBI agent turns up in later books. As does the background figure of the man employing the main antagonist of Morris and Chastain (a black with to Chastain’s white).
I’m not sure about the utility of using Quincey Morris grandson in this. It seems to make this a little like Dracula fan-fiction rather than a real book. It’s also clearly a first novel, with the common pacing flaws. It just drags a bit in places. It’s not a bad example of the type and well enough written that I’ve bought and read the next two in the sequence (re-reading this one to start me off). Recommended only if you particularly like this kind of thing, though. There are better modern urban fantasy series out there (though also many worse ones).
| Originally published at blog.a-cubed.info |
