I read the first one, and started the second, and I really quite liked it overall except I wanted to spork my eyes out over the use of a sans serif font. It was seriously painful to read at times, and distressingly hard to get into the story and stay there. ( )

Ok, so she’s missing the obnoxious pet, but she’s got a demon friend that looks like a polar bear, and that almost counts. Wren Valere is a retriever in the magical underworld of New York. What is a retriever? Well, perhaps thief is a better word, but it’s the kind of thief that has to negotiate both magical and mundane politics to get the job done, and balance on knife edge, where her abilities may pull her into madness if she loses control. ( )

I picked this up after reading one of Gilman’s short stories in an anthology. I’m usually not that enthused with urban fantasy, but this was a great example of that genre. Gilman has a great way with dialog which made the main character really enjoyable to spend time with. She also did a good job dropping little bits of history, much that didn’t affect the plot, but it gave the feeling of reality to the personalities and world without a big info dump. ( )

" Staying Dead" is the first book in an Urban Fantasy series. It has a lot of the right elements for success: originalish magics, sassy heroine, creepy baddy and lots of foreboding but, about a third of the way through I wasn't sure I'd continue.

The opening assumes an engagement with what happens to Wren, the magic-using thief, that I just wasn't feeling.

Things got better at about the half-way mark as the world-building and plot complexity ratcheted up with the introduction of a powerful secret society and more focus on how Wren came to be where she is.

There are some good action scenes, a wide variety of players, some intriguing rules for using magic and, in the end, I quite liked Wren and her partner. The novel does have a plot with reaches a spectacular, violent but clever resolution but on the whole it felt like a series Pilot, loaded with more that-could-be-interesting ooh-what-will-they-do-with-that stuff that the plot itself could sustain. It reminded me a little of Jim Butcher's first Harry Dresden book, "Storm Front" so I'm hoping there are good things to come.

A couple of things distracted me. Firstly the names. I still don't know what the title means? Perhaps the publishers thought it up to sound noirish? And the series title, "A Retriever Novel" gives me images of dopy dogs fetching tennis balls. And the secret society is called "The Silence" which is the sort of name I associate with 1970's college bands that used a Moog and released concept albums with a straight face.

Secondly, the formatting of the ebook is careless. Laura Anne Gilman uses a lot of sub-chapter shifts in point of view and action which I think work well but there is nothing in the layout to tell you when a shift is happening. How hard would it have been to add a few blank lines between shifts? Not doing it seems disrespectful to both writer and reader.

I've bought the next book in the series because I'm hoping that I've found something good here that just got off to a slow start. ( )

The first in the Retrievers series. This one has Wren trying to track down who has stolen the cornerstone of a high rise building. As we follow the story we learn there's more to this stone than would meet the eye and things were done that shouldn't have been when the building was put up. Nice start to the series. ( )