Brimstone Bound (Helen Harper)

Brimstone Bound
The Firebrand series, Book 1
Helen Harper
HarperFire
Fiction, Fantasy/Mystery
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: In just two weeks, Emma will finally achieve her dream and become a London detective... but first, she must endure one final trainee rotation into a random department before her final exams. She's hoping for cyber crimes, as that's where she intends to build her career, but instead finds herself assigned to the least desirable, most useless department in the city: the Supernatural Squad. One would think that working among the city's werewolves, vampires, and assorted other "supes" would be exciting, but in truth the few officers on the Supe Squad are little more than window dressing, to reassure the normal public; the wolves and vamps deal with their own, and if any crime actually involves humans in their district, the chief of detectives takes over anyway. Emma despairs, and her boyfriend Jeremy - who never approved of her putting herself in harm's way as a cop in the first place - nearly has heart failure, but she's come this far, and isn't about to let one crummy assignment sink her dreams. Besides, it's just two weeks, then she can walk away from the Supe Squad and never look back. What could possibly go wrong?
When Emma wakes up in the morgue, wrapped in a body bag and wreathed in flames, on her second day with the Supernatural Squad, she finds out just how wrong things can go. Someone lured her to a graveyard and slit her throat... and they didn't just try to kill her, they succeeded. Even she doesn't know how she survived, waking without a scratch, but now she has to find her own killer before they strike again - a task complicated by supernatural politics, turf scuffles, and one meddlesome, disturbingly handsome vampire who insists on helping her out.

REVIEW: Brimstone Bound has all the standard urban fantasy/detective trappings I've come to expect from the genre (at least, the parts of it I've sampled), down to the frequently-used London setting, but the parts, while familiar, work together fairly well. Emma makes for a credible lead, a little out of her depth but (usually) not too stupid to believe as a greenhorn cop; her unfamiliarity with the supernaturals gives other characters a reason to walk her (and thus the reader) through the "rules" of this particular urban fantasy scenario, where werewolves and vampires are dangerous but generally little more monstrous than human beings. The crime takes several twists and turns through potential culprits and motives, but Emma's a determined investigator and manages to work her way to the end (hardly a spoiler; it is a mystery, after all). As for Emma's little quirk of not staying dead... this is part of what cost it the full fourth star in the rating. How long must characters be clueless about something when it's given away on the danged cover? (I don't consider it a spoiler to say that, no, the mystery of Emma's true nature is never solved in this volume... but, come on, Emma, look at your own cover design! How long are you intending to drag readers along, here?) Setting that, and a couple other instances of her and others being slightly slow on the uptake, aside, this is a fairly decent little outing in a supernatural-tinged modern London, with action and danger and a little humor and just a whiff of potential romance (without it dominating the characters or the plot). I don't know that I'll follow the rest of the series, though, unless I need something to listen to at work again and nothing else is available on Overdrive. Urban fantasy just isn't my preferred subgenre, though I can appreciate it for what it is.

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