Magic and the Shinigami Detective
The Case Files of Henri Davenforth series, Book 1
Honor Raconteur
Raconteur House, LLC
Fiction, Fantasy/Mystery
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: Federal agent Jamie Edwards didn't plan on getting snatched from Earth on her way home from work, but evidently a witch in another world had other ideas. After untold months in captivity, enduring all manner of torment and magical alterations, she finally manages to kill Belladonna and escape... but this new world, with its peculiar amalgamation of Victorian-era sensibilities, steampunk-flavored technology, and plentiful magic - not to mention fantastic races like brownies, dwarfs, elves, and more alongside ordinary humans - will never truly be her home, even though there's no way to return from whence she came and survive, not after what the insane witch did to her. Like it or not, she'll have to build a life here. Fortunately, Jamie's job skills are surprisingly useful; where there are people, there's crime, and where there's crime, there are police officers and detectives.
Magical Examiner Henri Davenforth works in the bustling modern city of Kingston investigating the arcane aspects of crime scenes, mostly working alone (if his fellow department magical examiner Sanderson doesn't count, and Henri doesn't consider a man with all the sense of a flatworm as counting for much at all). But when a brazen attack on the station punches through the protection wards like a giant's fist punching through tissue paper, destroying the evidence locker and making off with a powerful artifact, the captain saddles him with a partner: the so-called "Shinigami Detective" herself, Jamie Edwards. Her reputation naturally precedes her; her single-handed murder of the exceptionally powerful and terrifying witch Belladonna was international news, and rumors coat her thicker than soot on factory walls. But the woman he expected is not at all what he finds. Somehow, being stuck with a detective doesn't seem so bad when it's Jamie. But the thieves are just getting started with their reign of terror, and the more they steal, the more likely that their ultimate target may be the very heart of Kingston itself.
REVIEW: This was another impulse download via Libby, promising an interesting mix of ideas with a little portal fantasy, a little steampunk, and a mystery at the crossroads of procedural crime and magic. It also presents a reasonably decent cast of characters who have some genuine chemistry and more or less solid banter between them. But the many parts and concepts don't always mesh cleanly, and more than once the story feels like it's spinning its wheels or jumping between ideas just to pad space.
From the beginning, Jamie is a determined survivor of untold abuses, physical and psychological and magical, at the hands of the insane witch. She has watched five other captives from other worlds perish under Belladonna's experiments, but also realizes that the witch is making her stronger - which turns out to be Belladonna's undoing, when Jamie turns the tables and breaks free. She wanders into the nearest town... and then the story skips ahead over a year, to where Henri is examining the break-in at the precinct and first meets her. The two couldn't be more different, in their ways; he's descended from money and loves food a little too much, while she's a no-nonsense investigator entirely cut off from her past, still determined to prove herself useful and come to grips with what was done to her (damage that lingers in plot-relevant ways; not only does she have certain enhancements, but distinct weaknesses that sometimes seem to exist simply so the author can avoid accusations of an overpowered heroine). She also continues to drop references to Earth pop culture in a way that Henri and others find both baffling and fascinating; she traipses close to Mary Sue territory, here, as sometimes she seems to exist as more an object of universal awe and desire, dazzling the natives with her sophisticated use of Harry Potter terminology and TV show references, than a fully realized character in her own right. But Henri isn't completely bowled over as an investigator or character, for all that he falls under the sway of her personality early on. The two make a decent team, and if he's in denial over how fast and how deep his feelings for her grow, well, he's not the first partner to fall for an outwardly mismatched colleague in fiction, nor will he be the last, and they make a reasonably compatible couple on personal and professional levels.
The investigation itself sometimes feels relegated to backdrop status, a feeling not helped by how revelations about magical properties sometimes feel contrived to either draw things out or push things ahead. (For that matter, the world itself felt oddly convenient, paralleling Earth in many ways but otherwise randomly diverging; Jamie can find most of the ingredients for curry and taco night, for instance, but Henri is baffled when she tries to describe a "cat"... despite, at one point, describing Jamie as moving like a cat - a glaring error, and not the only time I wondered if Raconteur was just making the worldbuilding up as she went along without regard for continuity or ramifications, but I digress.) The crime spree slowly escalates as the investigators race to unmask the culprits and deduce their ultimate goal. By the time they do, though, the ultimate answers feel weirdly anticlimactic and lacking the real twist or punch I'd hoped to find (and had come to expect from other, similar stories). But by then the case had served its purpose, allowing Raconteur to introduce her characters, her setup, and her world to the reader. And I will say that it kept me entertained. I just couldn't quite shake that sense of mismatched parts, and an underlying suspicion that I was reading fanfic that had had the serial numbers filed down, but which I would've recognized had I been familiar at all with the original franchise. (It could also be a sense that it was drawing on influences from manga convention, which I'm not familiar with enough to recognize; there was a strong sense of some formula at work beyond the broad strokes of portal fantasy, "buddy cop" procedural with hints of romantic potential, and genre mashup.) I don't expect I'll continue on in this series - particularly in audiobook form, as the gimmick of having male and female narrators voice relevant dialog and points of view sometimes grew oddly irritating - but I don't consider myself cheated. This is yet another case of a story being fine for what it was, but just not ultimately being my cup of cocoa.
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