This is a solid noir-lite urban fantasy: 2 parts Dresden Files, 1 part Jessica Jones, skewing a little towards a YA narrative style despite the mature themes. October Daye is the down-but-not-yet-out hero of the story, a half-blood fae PI scraping by in San Francisco. She just wants to be left alone to pick up the pieces of her shattered life (it’s tough to bounce back from 14 years involuntarily spent as a carp), but a dying curse draws her into the heart of a high-profile murder in the Court. Now she needs to solve it before the curse claims her as another victim.
The tone is hit-and-miss: sometimes the attempts to be “dark and gritty” fall flat, and end up just feeling maudlin and a little silly. There’s also a lot of trauma in this book, especially around the teens sexually exploited by a Fagin-like abuser running a halfway house for troubled half-bloods, but it feels like it’s trotted out as window dressing – “see how bleak and unflinching I can be!” rather than being mined for a real emotional payoff.
October is on the ropes throughout the book, and she’s constantly being picked up off the canvas by a rotating cast of rescuers. The lack of agency and the way she pinballs from one crisis to the next not only takes all of the detective work out of what’s initially set up as a detective story, it also quickly starts to feel like plot armor is the only thing keeping our girl on her feet.
I’m going to assume that this is at least partly intentional on the author’s part, and that there’s a multi-book character arc here where October eventually finds her way back to being the savvy, professional PI that her backstory suggests she was before the koi pond. October has enough potential that I can imagine giving the series another shot one day, once I’m able to come back to this world with a fresh pair of eyes.
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