Joshua Kronengold

I'm a little fried, so I'm going to try not to go into depth -- but I finished Seanan McGuire's (seanan_mcguire's) A Local Habitation -- the second October Daye novel -- and very much enjoyed it.

(no cut tag, but even a spoiler-free review has to say -something- about the work, so reader beware)

Seanan describes herself as an "old-school horror girl", and boy do she show it here, as our protagonist enters combat with a classic combination of horror tropes in a battle to the last murder and last revelation. This time, I, at least, found the mystery (or parts of it) to be fairly obvious -- but there's enough misdirection and stage business to keep you guessing about the details -- and to keep at least -some- surprises for the end.

Unlike the first novel in the series, Rosemary and Rue, where I had some questions about motives that I needed to reread the novel in order to resolve for myself, here, any similar questions are asked and answered in the text (I do have some quibbles -- but I'm a pretty careful reader and unless I close my brain, I nearly -always- have quibbles); this is a tight story with strong characters, a good unity of place and time, (unlike the first novel, where on reread I noticed that we largely rotated among 5-6 sets, this one takes place almost entirely in a single set--but a big and varied enoug one that it -feels- like we're in a different place almost every chapter), and satisfying developments in at least some of the the ongoing storylines established in the first novel in the series.

If you like well written Faerie-themed Urban Fantasy/Horror/Romance/Mystery -- or think you might, read this book!