Book #103

A Caress of Twilight
by Laurell K. Hamilton

So far, I have been less impressed with the Meredith Gentry series, as compared to the Anita Blake series. Not particularly because the Merry books are bad, because they're not -- I just think the Anita books are excellent, and the bar was set a leetle too high for these books in my mind.

This second installment picks up where the first left off: Meredith is living in LA, still working for the detective agency, and surrounded by the Queen's Guards, who are her lovers as she tries to win the Great Pregnancy Race. This time the case revolves around a Fae of the Seelie court, the pretty ones, who was exiled long ago; this Seelie moved into the human world and became an actress, an immortal and inhumanly beautiful ingenue. Makes sense. And now she needs Merry's help, because Merry is a member of the Fae courts, just as the actress, Maeve Reed, was.

This is the first problem. The detective agency thing is stupid. Private detectives have always struck me as a weak version of the police, when it comes to mystery and crime fiction; it is more reasonable for the police to be handling the juicy cases, but if you write about a cop, you have a very specific set of rules to follow, and a whole culture to deal with; making your character a PI frees you from that rigid structure, but it means you need to dream up some way that your guy can handle the big cases instead of the police. Sometimes it's well done: I think Sue Grafton has made a good setup with her detective in the alphabet books -- A Is for Alibi, and so on -- and Dennis Lehane did well with his pair of Boston detectives whose names I can't remember. But otherwise, it feels lame to me. Since Anita works with the actual police, and Hamilton writes that well, anything that Merry does as an investigator seems weak by comparison. In the first book, her "undercover" assignment seemed very rushed and contrived, and in this one, the case does not involve any detecting whatsoever. That's fine, I prefer that the complications in these books arise as this one did, but it would be so much more interesting to me if Merry worked for, oh I don't know, an ad agency. Or maybe dealt blackjack. Or did social work or something. So many good possibilities, and I don't like this choice. I really didn't like it when Merry was called out to consult on a mysterious death scene, as it felt far too derivative of the other series, and that was a mistake. Though the detail of the lipstick was brilliant; I wonder if they actually have that color.

But anyhoo, the story with Maeve is reasonably interesting; another take on immortality and one of its greatest flaws -- the fact that you have to watch mortals grow old and die while you stay young and perfect. It complicated the issue of Merry's pregnancy, which hasn't arrived yet, and which I hope has a reasonable explanation; personally, I think it would be interesting to have her get pregnant and become queen, and see what she does with the job, rather than have the race to conceive stretch out for nine or ten books. Just an opinion.

The interactions between Merry and her guards were good; I like that Merry's taking charge and becoming a leader, and I really appreciated that Hamilton ended the sexual tension subplots, both of them: Galen was healed, and Doyle finally gave in to his desires. Those were fine scenes; I like the way Hamilton is writing the sexual parts of these books, a little better even than the Blake series.

The climactic fight scene was very cool; the monster was excellent, both in conception and in description, and I like the aftermath of its defeat. But I hated the last few pages of the book, when Hamilton ran the wrap-up she usually does at the end of the Anita Blake books, where she pulls back and has Anita or Merry summarize how the events of the book affect her over the next several days, weeks, or months. I hated this one because the wrap-up came too soon and was too long; as the fight with the Nameless was still winding down, suddenly Merry is talking about the next several months and how they're going to go, and how everything is working out with the guards and with Kitto. I wanted more of the straight story before we got the conclusion. I also don't really care for Kitto's character, though I think the goblins are an excellent subplot. But I do want to read on, and I am growing fond of the characters, expecially Rhys, who got a whole heck of a lot more interesting in this book. And the most important part is these books do play to Hamilton's strengths: she is an excellent world-builder, and a great writer of horribly nasty crazy bad guys. Welcome to the Unseelie Court.