By Laurell K. Hamilton
Read: March 2010
Rating: Wham
My mummy picked up one of the books in this series, and must have liked what she saw. She didn’t read it, she went and ordered all eight books. Mummy hates starting a series that she can’t finish, or at least be able to read a big ol’ chunk at once. So, eight books landed on our doorstep and I get to look at them first cuz that’s just how it worked out.
Meredith is a princess of the UnSeelie court, living in Los Angeles under self-imposed exile. She had enemies trying to kill her, she had no strong powers, and she was mortal–a perfect target. The Queen, her Aunt, is so unimpressed that she tried to down Merry when she was six. So, she left, changed her identity, and has been working as a private detective ever since.
Naturally, such a state of affairs cannot last forever.
A case Merry is working gets out of hand, pushing her latent powers to the surface. Then the sluagh, the Hunt, arrives in all its monstrous glory; its king has orders to kill her. For reasons she cannot fathom, the Queen’s Darkness, her best warrior, arrives to save her. Meredith is being called back to court–but why?
The book is much more interesting if I don’t give away the mega-spoiler that is Why The Queen Wants Merry Back. We can talk about that in the next review.
When we start the book, it looks like this is going to be a series about a supernatural detective agency–Merry’s not the only fey on staff. There’s a big market for what they do, the fey live openly among humans, and some humans have psychic or magical powers. The structure of that genre falls away about 1/3 in, and then it’s a scary coaster into the realm of the Unseelie. I’ve already started #2 and it looks like the agency is still going to play a role, but it remains to be seen how much of a role that will be.
I nearly, nearly chucked it. Why? Because the first few chapters are hardcore OMG-Must-Explain-Everything-And-Impress-You-With-My-Badass-Narrator-itis. PAINFULLY so. Talk about your infodump. And let me say that if the Merry presented in those pages was the Merry in the rest of the book, I probably would have chucked it. Hard. The narrator there is a blowhard, talking a bit game and using slang and curses like that’s supposed to prove she’s interesting.
The Real Merry is interesting. She’s a true hybrid, part sidhe and part human, with some brownie thrown in. She was raised in the human world, the first sidhe royal to attend college, but after the death of her father she returned to the court and all its brutality. She’s learned the cultures of many of the fey peoples, and her father taught her well how to stay alive by playing the power games everyone in faerieland lives for.
She’s also incredibly honest, particularly about sex. When the book starts she’s sleeping with a roane, or selkie–seal man, and she mentions how much she enjoys being with him but she misses rougher sex. She misses having a lover who’s not afraid to mark her body. That’s your first sign that these books are going to push the boundaries when it comes to sex, and ‘the rules of romance novels’.
As I’ve mentioned before, most romances follow the rule that you don’t let your heroine enjoy sex with anyone who is not the hero during the course of the story. Hah! Merry doesn’t actually have sex with all these guys, but she certainly gets intimate with… six guys? Am I counting that right? Welcome to the Merry Gentry books: Where you gotta hump a lotta fish! And like it. Hamilton is a very skillful writer–I don’t have much resentment for Merry doing so much hopping. It’s more than a little unnerving how she can glide into these intimate moments one after the other, but that’s part of her sidhe nature. Actually, I was getting annoyed with the pace of the story in general, where everything was rammed right on top each other and no one had a chance to breathe. DEATH sex FIGHT make out Political Bargaining SMEX. Talk about’cher high energy.
You may have noticed that our romance categories just expanded. I’m giving Hamilton props for the hawttness, and also for the kink.
These are not romance novels. These are sexy, dark, dangerous stories. Enjoy!
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