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Liked It “Jes Battis is a major new fantasy talent who has knocked out of the ballpark with a A Flash of Hex, the second book in the Occult Special Investigations series. This one is a solid five stars. Urban fantasy, suspense thriller, police procedural, this book has it all. It is set several months...” see full review » see other reviews » |
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“Jes Battis is a major new fantasy talent who has knocked out of the ballpark with a A Flash of Hex, the second book in the Occult Special Investigations series. This one is a solid five stars. Urban fantasy, suspense thriller, police procedural, this book has it all. It is set several months after the conclusion of Night Child. Mia is living with Tess and Derrick, attending a local middle school. Tess is now an OSI-2 assigned to investigate a series of murders of the teenage children of powerful mage families in both Ontario and Vancouver. The murders are ritualistic in nature. Miles Sedgwick, a special psychic profiler, is brought in from Toronto and also provides a romantic interest for Derrick. Lucian Agrado, the dark necromancer is also back, lending his expertise on the case, and sending Tess' libido into overdrive. No spoilers, but their relationship progresses nicely. Other characters return from the first book, but to spell it out, would be a spoiler. We also meet Tess' mother and learn more about her biological father.
Kath0451 wrote this review Friday, October 30 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
Tess has created a great family for Mia and that family continues to expand with wonderful new secondary characters. Tess is a flawed, but totally believable, heroine. Battis excels at characterization. The reader accepts the characters and cares about them. This book is difficult to put down and I dropped everything else I was reading to concentrate on it. This series has me hooked.”
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Magical forensics and CSI procedural vs a serial killer targeting kids of mage families
I am divided. For the most part, this read was a winner. It began strong, then it was all over the place. I was so dismayed, because I was so excited about reading it, especially as the details of the grisly crime perpetrated by an impossibly powerful being unfolded. My first impression was that this paranormal mystery would be cutting-edge, but this impression failed to hold up somewhere near the middle of the book.
From a detail-oriented police procedural, it degenerated into a cartoon, with Justice League aspirations without the costumes. The book was unbalanced; so are my thoughts about it. I guess, I will just have to try to sift through my impression to come up with a coherent book blog.
the part I thought was 5 Stars
The story follows the progress of Tess Corday, a hard-core coffee guzzling occult special investigator (OSI). She’s forced to seek the help of Lucian Agrado, a guy who swings towards all things dark and deadly, a necromancer, after a series of ritualistic murders of runaway kids had occult investigators befuddled.
In Tess’s line of work, occult crimes happen all the time, perpetrated by mages, demons, and vampires. But, sometimes, something so evil—and terrifying—slips through the cracks of reality to mess with an OSI’s mind, and soul. Though OSI people can manipulate magical energy, or materia, they still have to rely on human wits and science to catch criminals. They don’t work in the sidelines; instead the influential members of their magically-gifted group manipulate society and politics to keep knowledge of magic’s reality under wraps from ordinary humans, or normates.
On the surface, Tess’s world is our world. Pop culture references, such as Facebook and Dexter the TV series, help create that illusion. The author’s habit of describing places (the story is set in Vancouver) keeps up appearances.
Though the political tensions between mage families, the people that control the OSI’s purse strings, is hinted at, the focus is the investigation, which is conducted using forensic science, detective work, and intuition.
I was pleased by this focus. The problem sometimes with urban fantasy is that the horror of a single human death by murder is overwhelmed or totally ignored by the greater picture of monsters walking the streets, devouring the weak. In this book, the event of a human being murdered is treated with all the attention, and respect, it deserves. The scene with the mother grieving for her murdered son was gut-wrenching.
But….
I mentioned intuition—this was Tess’s territory. For a book that initially presented itself as leaning towards evidence-based investigation, the leap from science to pursuing leads based on what Tess felt is startling.
So is the shift from sane to crazy shocking: from a sharp piece-of-work, Tess’s OSI supervisor somehow thought sending a team composed of an odd assortment of allies—ostracized necromancer, teenage almost-vampire, untried civilian, profiler with little combat-training—to accompany Tess and partner Derrick to storm the stronghold of the entity that has been murdering the children of mages in lieu of combat-trained mages is a great idea.
The OSI supervisor even brought along Tess’s teenage ward to the operation to ‘man’ the video monitors. I was scratching my head, baffled at this turn of events. To make the downhill slide more abrupt, the entity, when the team finally found it, chatted with them, making sure to explain every baffling little detail, and stupidly exposed its fatal weakness—which, of course, our heroes promptly take advantage of.
I’m also not crazy about the author’s obvious attempts to advance a socio-political ideal through her work. I actually don’t mind moral lessons in my reads; I just hate it when they’re less than adroitly written in that I notice it happening.
To read or not to
Well, yes. It’s not so bad. I still enjoyed reading this. If it began low, I would not have minded the weird developments. But as it is, it began high, so it could only fall down hard when the author lost her steam, or simply got lazy towards the end of the book.
A Flash of Hex is sequel to the Night Child
” maydiwayatangnawawala wrote this review Wednesday, July 29 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Adicting and hard to put down”
Jessica W wrote this review Tuesday, July 21 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“A good, solid occult mystery story, with a few things that were kinda awkward. The author is just starting to gain her footing with this series, so it's worth watching. There was a decent amount of reference to the first book that required you remembering it, so it may be worth reading the two together or re-reading the first before you read this one.”
CS W wrote this review Thursday, June 11 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
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