MAGIC IN THE SHADOWS, Devon Monk–Review
Today was release day for Book 3 of the Allie Beckstrom series by Devon Monk. In preparation for this happy day, last Tuesday and the Tuesday before that I, I reviewed book one, MAGIC TO THE BONE, and book two, MAGIC IN THE BLOOD.
I'm not going to talk too much about the cover this time, except to note again with approval that the machete she's holding actually shows up in the story, yay artists (it's still Larry Rostant) whose covers actually address the subject material.
The idea of this book is that Allie has to deal with the soul of her dead father cohabitating her body and generally trying to tell her what to do. She also has to deal with the Authority, which her father was a member of, though he did his dead level best to keep her off their radar and vice versa. Her main goal is to learn to better use her magical abilities, except nothing really comes out of that and she doesn't learn to do too much that's new.
Book three starts almost immediately where book two left off, which isn't something I really like in a series, mostly because it doesn't allow for as much of a lead-in to this story, and because it requires a lot more info-dumping in the beginning to catch the reader up. Unfortunately, MAGIC IN THE SHADOWS kicked off with a lot of infodumping, and I didn't enjoy the set-up too much, although the opening scenes were rather good visually. The pacing was good in the beginning, and we never got cheated out of our payoff.
Unfortunately, as I read through the rest of the book, the pacing started to feel a little hectic. Though I really enjoyed book two and book one had quite a bit of promise, book three felt like a bit of a let down. It was still a solid book, with a solid premise and a lot of good things about it (for instance, there's a moment when Allie splits her lip and she and her boyfriend stop kissing because she hasn't been tested lately, and recently she's had a few sketchy things happen to her--like being injected with a needle and stabbed, and she came into contact with bleeding people while she had open wounds--which I think is a great thing to see happen in a novel) but it wasn't excellent.