I believe I purchased this copy of Melissa Marr‘s The Wicked and the Dead during an online book fair.
In near-future New Orleans, Draugar, again-walkers, are faster and stronger than most humans, but not venomous until they are a century old. Until then, they shamble and bite. Since not everyone wants to see their relatives end up that way, Geneviève Crowe makes her living beheading the dead.
But now, her magic’s gone sideways, and the only person strong enough to help her is the one man who could tempt her to think about picket fences: Eli Stonecroft, a faery who chose to be a bar-owner in New Orleans rather than live in Elphame.
Then human businessmen start turning up as draugar.
Suddenly, the queen of the again-walkers and the wealthy son of one of the victims, both hire Geneviève to figure it out. She works to keep her magic in check, the dead from crawling out of their graves, and enough money for a future that might be a lot longer than she’d like. Neither her heart nor her life are safe now that she’s juggling a faery prince, murder, and magic.
I enjoyed this in a fleeting, in-the-moment way. It’s been a few days since I finished it, and already the details are fading. But I had fun in the moment, even if it isn’t memorable. I liked Geneviève as a character, though she was the only one fleshed out. The rest (the best friends and love interest) were pretty thin. This was mostly an issue with the love interest, Eli. He is a cardboard cutout of the loyal, lapdog love interest. More problematically, the book begins with the two of them having history, and the reader 100% feels the lack of knowing it. I checked Goodreads 3 times to make sure I wasn’t missing something: was this the first book in the series, is there a prequel, is it a spin-off from another series? Each time the answer was no, but I felt like there must be one because the book feels like it has a previous story somewhere that I’m missing.
The plot itself was interesting, but the mystery basically solved itself out of nowhere for no discernible reason, which felt too deus ex machina-like. Writing-wise, the book is perfectly readable, but it also has some annoying repetition I could have done without. All in all, I’d read another in the series but don’t expect it to be much more memorable than this one. A quick little ‘sweet treat’ making no lasting impression.
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