A.J. got in way ahead of me on this one, but I finally got around to reading Seanan McGuire's A Local Habitation
In this second October (Toby) Daye novel, the series takes an interesting excursion out of San Francisco proper to set almost the entire story in a suburban corporate office park which doubles as a faerie demesne. Inhabiting the Escher-like corridors of the world-straddling complex are the faerie employees of January (Jan) O'Leary, the niece of half-breed Toby's ducal employer, who has established her small independent county -- and high-tech startup company -- on a border between hostile faerie duchies. When said niece goes suddenly incommunicado, political complications prevent Duke Sylvester from conducting any overt investigation, so Toby and an inexperienced young companion, Quentin, are sent to find out what's going on. That turns out to be a series of seemingly impossible murders that leave no clues behind in the blood for Toby and Quentin to read. The murders have implications across various faerie races from the selkies (seal-shapeshifters) to the Cait Sidhe (cat-shapeshifters) to the Kitsune (fox-women); as in the first book, there are enough different faerie races involved to make me grateful for the glossary. But McGuires stays focused on faerie, so we are spared any plagues of vampires, werewolves, zombies, or other unrelated supernatural creatures wandering through the plot. I'm grateful for this as well.
While A Local Habitation is not a really a romance, Toby has distracting sexual tension going every which way in this novel, striking a few sparks with everyone from Jan's mysterious employee Alex (faerie race unknown) to the dashing King of the Cats to a former lover now married to Sylvester's rather nasty daughter. There's ample setup for potential romance and political and/or emotional drama with the daughter later in the series, but McGuire is taking her time getting there. That's fine; it leaves more room for the murder mystery, which was decent enough to keep me reading, though I figured out the culprit rather earlier than Toby.
While the cast of characters is interesting and the techno-faerie interface (complete with a dryad whose tree is the central computer server) interestingly developed, I didn't find this quite as strong a story as the Rosemary and Rue -- the murder mystery wasn't quite mysterious enough -- and I was sometimes exasperated by the amount of background information glossed over, apparently on the assumption that it was remembered from the first book. That was a reasonably good assumption in my case, but I couldn't help thinking as I read that a new reader would be missing quite a bit. I did appreciate the further delving into the nature of the night-haunts who dispose of faerie bodies, but for some reason are not taking those of the murder victims. I also feel that the series is building up to some sort of major event -- All Faerie Plunged Into War or some other form of armageddon. I hope it doesn't take too long to get there.
Once again, I found myself suffering from SCA-related free-association. Riordan is not so common a name that I can fail to notice that it just happens to be the SCA name of a former Princess of the SCA Kingdom of the Mists (the Bay Area) who also happens to be a costumer friend of mine. Making it the name of the rival Duchess was jarring to me. Can this really be coincidence?
None of these are strong enough complaints for me to fail to recommend the book, and I'm still quite looking forward to the next one (coming in September).
(Disclosure: Seanan is a dear friend of several of my good friends and a friendly acquaintance of mine.)
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