Spelunking through Hell by Seanan McGuire

 I tried, I really tried, to like this book, but I just couldn't care enough to finish it.

The point of view in this story switches to Verity's generation's grandmother, Alice Price-Healy, who has been mentioned a number of times in the other Incryptid stories. She is searching for her husband, who was taken away and stranded in a pocket dimension by the Crossroads, as the result of his deal with them for saving Alice's life. 

I should have felt more compassion for Alice and her quest, perhaps, but for some reason the whole thing just fell flat. Maybe McGuire has said all she really has to say on the subject of incryptids and the Healy family, but just didn't know when to quit.

Hoping that her October Daye novels don't grow stale, as well.

Pocket Apocalypse by Seanan McGuire

It seems like a mistake to call this book Urban Fantasy, since it takes place for the most part in the Outback - not the popular restaurant, either. When the Thirty Six Society, a group of cryptozoologists down under, encounter their first werewolf infestation their leader Riley reaches out to his daughter, Shelby Tanner, and she drags Alex out of his comfort zone at the zoo to help contain the outbreak, all the way across the ocean.

Incidentally, this gives him an opportunity to get to know the family that he's probably going to be a part of someday, when he and Shelby finally tie the knot. Unfortunately, they're not particularly happy to see him, for various reasons, and his time there is fraught with the difficulties of Meet the Parents, as well as using his experience with North American lycanthropes to help them kill or cure the local ones.

He actually gets along better with the local Incryptid population than the humans, which works out well when he is able to enlist their help dealing with the werewolves. Alex turns up some new and startling facts about werewolves that his family did not know, or perhaps simply chose not to relate, which complicate matters.

One little plot piece that I didn't think was all that great was when the main villain of the story tries to "talk Alex to death" much like the Bond villains. Just do what you're gonna do already, buddy. No wonder your side always loses.

A fun little story. Wonder if the POV is going to shift to another sibling now. Maybe even one of Shelby's.

Half Off Ragnarok by Seanan McGuire

Alexander Preston, aka Price, is Verity Price's brother, who is working at the reptile cage in a zoo in Ohio. He is on assignment for his family, researching the changes in cryptid populations due to climate change and species' dying off. It's tough to be a "secret agent" and have a steady girlfriend, but Alex manages to slip away one day to be with his sweetie for lunch - then a corpse turns up! Worse yet, it's obvious to his trained eyes that some sort of petrefactor (like a basilisk or gorgon) has killed their coworker.

McGuire does a fantastic balancing act of foreshadowing a surprising twist that is a major milestone for this story line. His girlfriend, visiting big cat researcher from Australia, Shelby, has a big secret, and astute readers will catch very subtle clues along the way to the big reveal, while those clues are not so obvious that we wonder why Alex doesn't immediately pick up on them. Other authors are not nearly as subtle with this technique, so it's refreshing to see it done well. I just had a twinge or two here and there that said, "There's something...odd...about that girl."

So, as the casualties mount, and both Alex and Shelby come under attack, it becomes a mystery which must be solved - to save our heroes, and to save the cryptids in the area from being revealed to humans and the Covenant of St. George. I have to say, the identity of the killer totally blindsided me. That doesn't happen a lot in mysteries after you've read a handful of hundreds.

So, there are three Price siblings, Verity, Alex and Antimony. I suspect we'll see another from Alex's POV, then a couple from Antimony, before we either return to Verity or do something completely different. Much better to tell the tale this way, from my own POV, than to go massively multiplayer.

Midnight Blue Light Special by Seanan McGuire

So, I finally came up with a term that I choose to use for the occasions when an author heads up a chapter with a piece of faux history, an adage from a fictional wise man, or a quote from persons of fictional or other dubious heritage - epigram. Epigram as seen in the #2 definition from Webster's Collegiate Dictionary - a terse, sage, or witty and often paradoxical saying.

McGuire done a couple of things in this second iteration of the Incryptid series with her chapter headings. First, she's included an epigrammatic quote from the females in Verity Price's family tree, usually dealing with the intertwined subjects of love and weaponry. Second, she has placed a graphic above these that indicates inn whose "voice" the tale is told. Fortunately, she's telling a multi-POV story with just two narrators, rather than massively multiplayer, like Weber, so once I caught on to it, it was easy to tell whether Verity, whose graphic was a set of dancing footprints, or Sarah, whose graphic was a mathematical equation (reflecting, of course, her favorite hobby of auditing math classes) was the protagonist of the moment.

Another refreshing thing in this urban fantasy is that Verity doesn't have all the de rigeur trust issues that plague the genre. She has a loving and well-armed family, and has many allies in the cryptid population of Manhattan. In fact, it's far more likely to be those allies who have to learn to trust Verity, for a change, when a hit team from the Covenant of St. George arrives in town to check on their boy, Dominic De Luca, and to make sure any cryptids in the area are swiftly eradicated.

In fact, the only trust issue for Verity is whether or not she can trust her boyfriend, Dominic, to look out for her and the monster population, rather than to return to the not-so-loving arms of the Covenant and his own family, when push comes to shove.

How many of us have felt just this way, in a metaphorical sense?
"Come on, let's go see a dragon about an apartment."

McGuire is prepping us new POVs in the next couple of books in the series, primarily concerning Alex, Verity's brother, when she allows us to get into her adopted cousin Sarah, the cuckoo's, head.

"It's being a cuckoo like me that's hard. Sometimes I feel like neither nature nor nurture did me any favors. Here, Sarah. Have a moral and ethical code that means you'd feel bad killing people for your own enjoyment, and have a set of instincts and hereditary skills that means you're not really built to do anything else. It'll be fun!"

Not as much carnage as I, and the waheela, Istas, were hoping for when the final showdown arrives, but this is a fun and easy read, with a slightly odd take on the urban fantasy scene.

Discount Armageddon by Seanan McGuire

It seems that the urban fantasy genre started a while back with the vampires appearing on the modern scene in books like Interview with a Vampire by Rice and The Dracula Tape by Saberhagen, and rather rapidly spread, to the point where it's gotten difficult to find any classic, high fantasy these days. The vampires and werewolves seem to be the most popular legendary critters, perhaps because of their romantic vibes with the teen scene, but slowly just about every other denizen of lore has made an appearance in some author's work. McGuire adds a new twist or two here, with her introduction of diverse "cryptids" in a new series. The style and plot seem very similar to some of Larry Correia's Monster Hunter books, without (despite the title) the apocalyptic implications which seem to be his stock in trade.

Actually, the whole point of the book may just be McGuire's desire to write a novel about defeating monsters through the powers of ballroom dance. The protagonist, Verity Price, comes from a family of cryptozoologists - those who study the supernatural species which still linger in the cracks of society. She really loves ballroom dancing, and believes she can make a successful career of it, so she is living in New York on her own to prove to her family that she can protect and serve the cryptids there, as well as succeed in the cutthroat world of competitive dance.

She works in a stip club run by a bogeyman named Dave - neat little invention introduced here - "darks". He can turn on the darks in his office, instead of turning on the lights, resulting in various shades of darkness where he can be scary - a bogeyman's favorite pasttime. Most of the club's other employees are also cryptids, of the sort that can pass for human, including a dragon princess named Candy who is a fireproof bombshell blonde, a shape-shifting waheela (yeah, I never heard of one before, see the glossary at the back of the book)  named Istas who is a Goth Lolita, and Carol the gorgon, with uncontrollable snakes in her hair.

Someone is causing unattached female, presumably virgin, cryptids to disappear, and Verity decides it is her mission to find out why. The Price family originally belonged to an organization called The Covenant, which fanatically dedicated its time to wiping out all cryptids from the face of the planet, but at some point several generations ago, they realized that cryptids were people, too, for the most part, and deserved life, liberty and the pursuit of happinesss, as long as that happiness didn't involve harming other sentients. In the course of her investigations, Verity is caught in a snare set by a young member of the Covenant who has been sent to see if New York City requires a purge of its cryptid population, Dominic De Luca.

You can see this one coming a mile away, as Verity is immediately attracted to and simultaneously repelled by, Dominic's good looks and his fanatical devotion to wiping out cryptids. Coincidentally, I was reading a blog post about plot devices the other day that talked about romantic comedies - and Verity and Dominic's affair followed the plan perfectly. Also quite predictably...virgins being abducted for nefarious purposes...gotta be either a volcano or a dragon, right? Turns out there's a dragon snoozing beneath the city, and Verity and Dominic need to reach it before the bad guys succeed in rousing it, to create chaos in the Big Apple.

A promising start to a new series, a little less serious than McGuire's October Daye novels.