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.

MAGIC IN THE SHADOWS felt a bit like the editor saw the burgeoning success of the series and decided to slack off a bit in urging the right amount of tightening around the middle and the end. The sub-threads (involving the creepy nightmare thing, Davy's ex-girlfriend, Allie's father) mostly come together in the end, though Allie's father randomly stops insisting that she find the discs find the discs find the discs, and there's no real indication of why his behavior changed. Allie also doesn't talk to Violet about how her father might be affecting their relationship, even though it seemed like she intended to and she certainly should.

But the main thing that bothered me about this book was the loose ends. Things didn't get ignored, subplots didn't get dropped, no, but so many things were planned out that didn't happen. Though it seems they'll be looked at in the next book, and I don't mind when the last 10 pages set up the thing to be dealt with next time or if there are subplots that span multiple novels (for instance as happens in The Dresden Files) that's not what happened here. Instead, Nora came into town to get Cody, and sure, there was a happy ending there, but Allie never actually gets a free minute to sit down and bond with her friend. They see each other in passing, and it's a bit irksome. There are things that Allie plans to tie up with Violet that she never gets to. She has lessons she's agreed to start taking, but she never even picks out an instructor. Because she never has time, it's pushed off "until later." But as a reader, I want the "later" to come during the time frame of the book. I want the story to be wrapped up.

Unfortunately, this one wasn't, and one of the side effects of this is that the pace felt hectic. Which brings me to my last problem with MAGIC IN THE SHADOWS, which was that it was kind of confusing. I don't want to sound like I didn't understand what was happening or that the plot didn't make sense, because it did. But there were moments when I felt a little lost about what was going on, and they didn't all get cleared up. As a reader, I don't like that feeling of quicksand beneath my toes, even if the narrator is probably feeling the same way.

That said, there certainly were things I enjoyed about MAGIC IN THE SHADOWS. I really liked the gargoyle, and the subtle hints that were dropped about the Hand who created it and the relationship that Allie and he have that may have allowed her to set him free. I loved that we got to see Nora again, and the way that Zay and Allie begin working on their relationship. Seamus was a great character, and seeing him (an adult) interact with his mother (a real badass) was very cool. It was also good to see Zay interact with his peers, have a friend, instead of just playing strong, silent type with Allie. We see a lot of his past--including an ex that causes trouble for Allie, though the way Allie refrained from being catty was great to see, given the general bitchiness that pervades the genre. Monk also does a good job showing characters who have dark tendencies, unfortunate addictions, and real problems, while letting those problems be problems without defining the characters or making them into cookie cutter bad guys while simultaneously refusing to forgive those dark traits just because the characters are on the side of the angels.

In general, I think the series is still promising. Monk does a lot of things right, and the things she does right are things that I find really important philosophically and that the majority of the genre tends to get teeth-grindingly wrong. However, I felt this book experienced a few growing pains.

3/5: The concept is great and this book did a lot of things right, but the pacing and loose ends caused a lot of problems for me.

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The first thing I noticed when I got this book was how different Allie looks on the cover in comparison to MAGIC TO THE BONE. She's still clearly recognizable--same hair, same tattoos, even the same clothing style, but this Allie looks emaciated and a little fae. Her eyes are almost too big for her face, and she's clutching a bloody knife. I don't say any of this as a critique of the artist, Larry Rostant, but rather in many ways as a compliment. Allie is in a different place in her life in this book--and MAGIC TO THE BONE took a lot out of her, emotionally and physically. It makes sense that she'd look a little tired and lost.

I'm going to skip giving a summary of the book, since you can find one anywhere and it's not a brand new book, and just talk about the stuff I liked and didn't like about it.

In the last review, I mentioned how much I love the consequences that Allie has to go through, such as potentially losing her memory, massive bruising, etc. for using her magic. She has ways of coping--recording things that happen to her, directing backlashes so that she can prepare for the pain to come--but in MAGIC TO THE BONE, we never really saw her write much down in her book, so it's great to see that come back to bite her in MAGIC IN THE BLOOD, where she has no memory of her Happily Ever After, which also changes my perspective on how easy it seemed to attain; now, in book two, we see that there are still difficult things left for Allie to face.

This isn't the only weakness that Allie has, either. There are a lot of things about her that make her seem human, instead of the kind of bad-ass, butt-kicking machine that some protagonists are. For instance, her claustrophobia is portrayed realistically as something that she has, that chokes her up, but it doesn't incapacitate her (even when the stakes are low, instead of the claustrophobia being something she "overcomes" in a moment of need, which I thought was a nice touch). She's living hand to mouth (despite coming from a relatively rich background, but her inheritance is tied up in legal matters and she's never been a big fan of her father, so she's been doing without for years anyway), takes the bus, and her cell phone is busted. The minor problems life throws in front of her are believable, but they add up to set the tone of the book really well.

Many of the things I liked about MAGIC TO THE BONE are present here, as well, including the presence of strong secondary female characters. I really liked Violet, Allie's scarily competent young step-mother, and Allie's relationship with Payne, one of the cops she goes to when she comes across illegal activity during her Hounding jobs. Payne is a tough cop who never smiles, but Allie doesn't hold it against her, and the two women get along in their own way. They'll never be best friends, but they're capable of having a professional relationship with mutual liking on both sides, which is such a pleasant change from what I see in the rest of the genre.

Speaking of friends, it's nice that Allie has people who care about her, and it's sometimes heartbreaking that there are people she's friends with, where she doesn't remember that friendship. On the other hand, it makes for an interesting dichotomy because on the one hand, we have the semi-traditional loner protagonist, but on the other, it's not because she's snarky or has trust issues or doesn't like people, but because of her memory problems... and people still care for her anyway. Sometimes as a reader it's frustrating that Allie forgets things we know (I personally am not a huge fan of knowing things that my first-person narrator doesn't, like whodunnit or that so-and-so is perfect for her and please get it over with already), but we know that it's just as frustrating for Allie, which draws you into her story even more.

However, what I really didn't like about it was the way that we felt like we were going over the same ground again and again. In the last book, Allie started from not knowing Zay to dating him. In this book, Allie starts from pretty much not knowing Zay to dating him. The trouble with the losing-her-memory concept is that it makes the books a little repetitive. This isn't to say that Monk actually repeats herself in terms of the plots or even the relationships--Zay and Allie go through things very differently this time around--but conceptually, I'm a bit bothered by the way Allie's memory loss makes us go back over familiar ground.

Also, something I didn't mention before but probably should have, is how good Monk's prose is on a purely pleasure-of-reading analysis. I love that she remembers to include more than just sight and hearing inasfar as senses go--we get to smell cinnamon buns along with Allie, feel the creepy ghostly hands of her father, etc. I will say that a few cliches sneak in, but I suspect I've just been made oversensitive by critique groups.

That said, I should probably address the plot. I'm going to try to do so without giving spoilers, but it'll probably come out vague. I mostly liked the plot, with the ghosts and the dead dad and the Authority (Men in Black types who do behind the scenes stuff with magic) and the Pack (a new organization of Allie's fellow Hounds). I thought that the two main threads, the kidnapped girls and the ghosts, came together nicely in the end. I did think that the story was missing the kind of edge-of-your-seat suspense that a truly great, once-in-a-lifetime book would have had, but I liked this enough to give it full marks, and am certainly looking forward to when Allie finds out more about the Authority, and to how she deals with being the new "leader" of the Pack.

5/5: Monk is definitely settling in to what promises to be a great series, and I loved this book.

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Allie Beckstrom is a Hound, able to trace a spell back to its caster, and while she may be one of the best there is at what she does, that doesn't make her home any less crummy or her bank account any less meager. This despite the fact that her father is a rich, powerful businessman, because she left that world long ago. But when she comes across a little boy dying from an illegal magic Offload, which is a way of avoiding the price of magic, she's drawn back into that world--because the Offload bears her father's magical signature. And then her father turns up dead, and she's the lead suspect, which complicates things quite a bit.

My favorite element of this series is the price of magic that Monk has chosen to have her characters pay. The first line of the back-cover blurb was Everything has a cost. And every act of magic extracts a price from its user... and that drew me in immediately. I come from the school of thought that insists that magic shouldn't be a get-out-of-jail-free card for a character; it doesn't exist to make things easy or just for the shiny coolness factor.

I remember when I first came across Holly Lisle's eleven Rules for Better Fantasy. I won't say they changed my life, but they certainly changed the way I read fiction. If a particular kind of magic is a way out of trouble for a character, or doesn't come with consequences, chances are I'm never even going to get past the book's back cover.

Monk handles the consequences of magic portion very well, and quite cleverly. I liked the way the backlash was unpredictable, but that you could take the time to direct what kind of price you would pay--headache, arm bruises, etc. But if you forgot, or didn't have time--as happens frequently to Allie--you could end up losing chunks of your memory, or the bruising could be internal and life-threatening. Allie has to carry around a book to record her life in, and if she doesn't have time for that, well, the author doesn't forget about those kinds of consequences either.

Another great thing about MAGIC TO THE BONE was the presence of a functioning friendship between two female characters, which is something all too rare in the genre. The two best friends aren't close geographically, as they lead very different kinds of lives and are very different people, but that doesn't interfere with the strength of their friendship or their ability to rely on, and to know, one another, which I thought was wonderful, as I have several long-time friends who I see only rarely, and that doesn't diminish our relationship when we do see one another. Also, Allie's relationship with her (most recent) step-mother was incredibly refreshing to see unfold.

I was a bit iffy about the romantic entanglement, particularly because of the way the sex and magic intertwined to be a sort of power-boost, but also because of the swiftness of how their relationship evolved despite the major secrets they seemed to keep from one another. However, because I've read the second book, my long-term view of the "happy ever after" ending isn't as negative as it used to be. Since I don't want to spoil MAGIC IN THE BLOOD, I'll leave off discussing that for now.

All in all, it's not the best book I've read recently, but it's enjoyable and interesting, and the series has a great deal of potential. I'm glad I picked it up, and feel no compunctions about recommending it to friends.

4/5: A good, solid lead-in to a promising series, but I'm not raving about it yet.

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