Samantha is trying to start a new life in San Francisco after
her life in Boston and Salem collapsed after taking down the Dark Witch Coven
there. Now is her chance to restart without magic, with a new room-mate, Jill,
and a new police partner, Ed.
Until a murder has the hallmarks of magic all over it –
starting with a truly impossible and incomprehensible cause of death. Samantha
is again faced with an impossible choice – ignore her power and let more people
die (and there may be even more at stake this time than in Boston) or again
delve into her magical past and risk losing everything, again. Perhaps even
herself.
Worse, her self-control is frayed. She’s using magic
without meaning to and it’s getting worse, to an extent that’s beginning to
make her dangerous to those around her.
One of the things I like about this book is how many
characters are painted really quite deeply with relatively little information
on them. We don’t see much about Samantha’s partner, Lance, but in the short
moments we see of him, in the things we learn of him, I get a full picture of
the character. Jill, her room mate, doesn’t go into a lot of detail about who
she is and what she does, but, again we have a pretty strong picture of her
And this is really clear with Samantha with a picture of
her that’s developing in my head that adds to her own narrative. From her own
POV we can see the insecurity, the worry, the desperate attempt to leave magic
behind, the fear of what it could do to her, how dark and dangerous it could
make her. But we also see her willingness to do what must be done not only in
the big scenes where she does use magic despite her fears – but in smaller
scenes as well, like when she uses Jill as bait and lies to her about the
danger. I like this sense that there is a ruthlessness to her, even a darkness
that she refuses to acknowledge or connects entirely to her magic.
The case itself was confusing in all the best ways.
Things were happening, things were escalating, but we’re not quite sure what,
how they’re connected or why – which was all made even more tangled by the time
shifts moving the plot line around. They mystery remained mysterious and there
were a lot of twists back and forth, a lot of questions to answer and a lot of
things going on to keep us engaged and involved. It wasn’t a book I stayed up
all night to read, unable to put it down – but nor was I ever tempted to
abandon it and nor was reading it ever a chore – I enjoyed it from start to
finish.
In the end, I like a lot of the development and the story
but in some ways this book feels like a tangent. She got away from her friends,
but her calling Ed re-established that link and, of course, she still kept in
touch with Anthony. She held her tenuous ties to Salem and, ultimately, ended
up going back there. I can’t shake a small feeling that the book was a
distraction, that the plot, the meta being established, is all in Salem so why
did we zip over to San Francisco only to return again? Especially since the way
this book ended invalidated so many of the personal relationships she forged in
San Francisco. It felt almost like the book finished with a great big reset button.
Despite that, I am glad that the events touched on in the first book haven’t
been brushed into the irrelevant past and are still going to loom large in the
coming story – and that we have meta plot that was begun in the very first
book.
I really do like the imagery involved with Samantha’s
repressed memories, the different years she’s buried, the things she had to
deal with then and it adds to her ongoing representation of trauma. Her past
isn’t just something that troubles her or upsets her – she is still haunted by
it, by the memories, the flashbacks and the nightmares. They can be heavy at
times but it’s a powerful depiction and a relief from so much of the genre
where traumatic pasts and horrific childhoods are used for relatively empty
characterisation without.
I also enjoy it as an interesting way to limit a
super-powered character. It’s clear that Samantha is powerful and knowledgeable
and probably more dangerous than anyone else in the books. She also has vast
potential – it’s difficult with such a character not to have her become all
powerful, that she has reasonable limits or to make sure that she doesn’t
become defined by her power. Having a powerful character with a strong reason
to avoid her power coupled with these
memory blocks leaves her with all of her potential without her becoming a
roving, dangerous.
We do have an inclusion issue that has continued from the
first book. This San Francisco is entirely straight. We do have some POC – a
Latina medical examiner (who appears once and then speaks occasionally on the
phone. Which is a shame because she seemed to be an interesting character I
would have liked to see more of) and one of the murder victims is Native
American. The Native American elements have some interesting issues that were touched
upon – the idea of losing culture and heritage over the generations, the
importance of preserving cultural lands and artefacts. But both had the sense
of being included for story purposes rather than to build a more well rounded
character – the lands so they could have a woo-woo cave with legends attached,
the shaman so they could discuss a magical practitioner. It creates a sense
that, had the woo-woo justifications not been needed, these characterisations
wouldn’t have been either.
I’m left really fascinate with this series and hooked in.
The story is interesting enough, novel enough and exciting enough that I
definitely want to know what’s happening next, what is behind the Last Grave,
what is the source of so much trouble in so many different places. The world
building is intriguing enough to make me curious about the demons, the magic
and what may come. But, perhaps most, Samantha is a character I’m invested
enough in to want to know where she goes from here, how she develops, how she
deals with her past and what is she going to become as she uncovers more of her
memories and self. There’s a lot more to come here and I look forward to it.
