A very confusing read with a hard to follow narrative. I wasnt able to finish it. ( )

I honestly don’t have a lot to say about this book. It was just an okay read. I had no idea what was happening in the beginning and I don’t know if that was my fault or the authors. Maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood and was having trouble understanding or maybe the author didn’t explain things well enough. I also had trouble keeping track of the characters. There aren’t even that many but I didn’t care about any of them so I had to stop reading every once and awhile and try to remember who they were talking about.

Other than those problems, I enjoyed the book enough to read it in a day. Although, I don’t know if that would have happened if I wasn’t reading this during a read-a-thon. If it wasn’t for the read-a-thon it probably would have taken me a few days to get through it. It wasn’t that great. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t hate it either. I will be picking up the next book, Wild Hunt, soon. Hopefully it’s better. ( )

This is the first new urban fantasy novel I've read in a while. I know the author, and like her, so I was predisposed to like the book, but I'm sure I would have enjoyed it even if I'd never met her. The protagonist and her friends and acquaintances are all believably complex and vivid. I enjoyed the fairly-recent-past Boston setting mixed in with the Celtic mythology.

I'm just beginning the second book in the series now, and look forward to the third installment! ( )

Evie Scelan is the Hound, whose nose can find anything (no animal transformation, though). She ekes out a living as a finder of lost objects and a bike messenger. Boston’s “undercurrent” is ruled by powerful, dangerous adepts, and when an old flame asks for her help, Evie is drawn far deeper in than she ever wanted to go. I thought that this was very well-executed urban fantasy: there are even two male love interests to go along with the eldritch powers, but the powers themselves are unusual and the conflicts felt organic, not formulaic. ( )

Urban fantasy novels can go in a couple of different directions, and this one tends towards the gritty and grim. In Margaret Ronald's alternate Boston, almost all the magic users are addicts living marginal half-lives, consumed by paranoia. The magicians who aren't flat-out bums fit into another, even more unsavory category: they're evil. A group known as the Bright Brotherhood keeps a mafia-style chokehold over Boston's supernatural population - if you're not with the Brotherhood, you're against them; and if you're against the Brotherhood, your days are numbered.

The novel's heroine, Evie Scelan, is par for the course in the genre but very easy to like. She's a part-time bike messenger who's starting up a fledgling business in finding lost items. Her attitude towards her own magic seems a little schizophrenic. On the one hand, we she spent most of her adult life hiding her abilities; she knows it's dangerous to be recognized as a magic user in Boston. On the other hand, her new business is all about advertising, and using, her unique magical talent. She's a "Hound" - she can find lost things, trace scents where there's no physical trail. Pick a pebble up off the ground for a minute, and she could trace the magical residue left on it for miles.

So the plot heads off in a few different directions, which all converge neatly at the end. First, Evie gets a phone call from an old flame - he's been forced to work for the Bright Brotherhood, and he's going to make a run for it. They didn't part on good terms, but Evie's determined to find him and help him get free. This already seems like a fool's errand, but there's more. Her good friend Sarah, a white witch, asks her to hunt down a collection of "chain stones" - stones with magical properties. Evie doesn't realize it at the time, but these stones are very, very important to the Bright Brotherhood. And then, to make matters worse, it soon becomes clear that she probably won't need to look very hard to find the Bright Brotherhood...because they're already hunting her. Her magic has come to their attention, and now they want to force her into the fold.

Evie spends most of her time taking two steps backward for every one step forward. She gathers information bit by bit, and all the while the Brotherhood is attacking her and her friends. For every clue she finds, someone she loves is kidnapped, or some potential informant is killed. This makes the book a real page-turner, but it also casts a shadow over all of Evie's small victories, because the price of progress is pretty steep.

Bizarrely enough, while Evie's day-to-day reality is relentlessly grim, Ronald's mythology is complex, gorgeous, and incredibly charming. At the end of the book, the author notes that she got a lot of her material from a college course on Celtic mythology, and I'm thinking that's why there's such a richness and depth to her references here. But the most charming thing of all - the most wonderfully Bostonian aspect of the book - is the way that Ronald incorporates the Red Sox, and the team's mythology, into the plot.

The only thing that really didn't work for me here was the romance. It's hard to say much about it without giving spoilers, but Evie's relationship with both of her potential suitors rang false to me. On the whole, though, Spiral Hunt puts down a solid foundation for a series. The second book has already been published, and I'll be picking it up as soon as I can. ( )