I wanted to read something that wasn’t miserable. My aim was to find a folk lore re-telling, but Stefan (from Stefan’s books) suggested this one. It’s supernatural crime and mystery.
Here’s the blurb …
From the acclaimed author of Senlin Ascends comes the first book in a wildly inventive new fantasy series where magical mysteries abound and only one team can solve them: The Hexologists.
The Hexologists, Iz and Warren Wilby, are quite accustomed to helping desperate clients with the bugbears of city life. Aided by hexes and a bag of charmed relics, the Wilbies have recovered children abducted by chimney-wraiths, removed infestations of barb-nosed incubi, and ventured into the Gray Plains of the Unmade to soothe a troubled ghost. Well-acquainted with the weird, they never shy away from a challenging case.
But when they are approached by the royal secretary and told the king pleads to be baked into a cake – going so far as to wedge himself inside a lit oven – the Wilbies soon find themselves embroiled in a mystery that could very well see the nation turned on its head. Their effort to expose a royal secret buried under forty years of lies brings them nose to nose with a violent antiroyalist gang, avaricious ghouls, alchemists who draw their power from a hell-like dimension, and a bookish dragon who only occasionally eats people.
Armed with a love toughened by adversity and a stick of chalk that can conjure light from the darkness, hope from the hopeless, Iz and Warren Wilby are ready for whatever springs from the alleys, graves, and shadows next.
There is great world building here – it feels like London in the 1920s, but different. Although there is a nod to some modern concerns as well – pollution, etc. Iz and Warren are delightful characters – Warren in particular. Not to mention the dragon, who is quite a character, and lives in the Gladstone bag called Grandpa. There are adventures, double-crossings, and some lovely domestic scenes. There was one thing I found a tad annoying, Iz made an assumption early on, when there wasn’t enough evidence to make such a firm decision. The rest of the plot unfolds from there, which was disappointing (and in my opinion went against her character).