A Local Habitation: An October Daye Novel [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

I was really looking forward to A Local Habitation. Rosemary and Rue impressed me - it was smart, with a really vivid setting and amazing worldbuilding, and an appealing underdog heroine. I had some problems with the plotting, but it had so many of the qualities necessary to a good series that I was excited about continuing on with the story.

Having read A Local Habitation, I'm not exactly disappointed. I read it in one sitting, but this time I didn't close the book eager to find out what happens next. I still admired the really excellent setting and atmosphere. But the new book provided new, different plotting problems. I thought that the author telegraphed the villain too soon, and too obviously. That's overstating things a bit, but without giving spoilers, all I can say is I had a rough idea of how things were going to play out by page...I don't know, 50 or 60? Way, way too early.

And then I started getting irritated that Toby wasn't seeing the obvious. It's frustrating to read a book where you can put together all the clues, and you know that your protagonist has access to all the same information that you do, but doesn't make the same connections. It's even more frustrating when people are dying all over the place. Toby starts off the book feeling all this guilt because she couldn't keep Dare alive, and then she walks into her next assignment and repeats the same mistakes she made before.

There's one really key moment in A Local Habitation where Toby decides she needs to perform a very dangerous ritual. It's a really cool scene in the book. It's tense, fascinating, gives us insight into the world of fairy and Toby's character, shows us how brave she is and how totally willing she is to put everything on the line for the safety of others. The problem? It's ultimately a distraction. If Toby had opted not to perform this dangerous and fascinating ritual, she'd probably have solved her case a lot faster, and prevented someone from dying.

And I think that McGuire has a similar issue with the Tybalt plotline. Tybalt is an obvious love interest. McGuire writes their interactions as though they still have some sort of love/hate relationship, but they don't act that way at all. When Tybalt leaves his jacket at Toby's house at the beginning of the novel, she picks it up and wears it for pretty much the rest of the book, and takes comfort from the smell. When Toby is in trouble, Tybalt drops everything to come to the rescue. Tybalt is blatantly jealous - which Toby somehow doesn't pick up on at all - and Toby finds him attractive. So why does she consider pretty much every single other adult male in the whole novel as a potential love interest, but not Tybalt?

I love a good, slow, prickly advance-and-retreat between a heroine and her love interest. I'll follow along for book after book, watching the couple slowly, slowly, slowly get closer. But that's not what's going on here. Toby and Tybalt have advanced, neither is retreating, and the author is artificially keeping them apart to draw out their plotline. Apparently she thinks that readers can't tell the difference, but I can and I find it maddening.

So basically, the second book in the series had all the same strengths and weaknesses as the first one did. When McGuire does something well, she does it really well. But I'm starting to think that it's just not enough, at least for me. I love Toby, she has a great voice, I love McGuire's fairy-riddled San Francisco, I love the characters, so many of the twists and turns are really COOL, but I always feel like I'm being pulled along the author's guided track. The staging is perfect, but she loses me on the execution.

I really want to be more enthusiastic. I'd love to leave a glowing review. But I can't.

I preface this review by stating that there may be spoilers, depending upon how aggravated I become later on.

There are two ways to look at this book. The first presents a kinder interpretation of Seanan McGuire's writing skills: this is really the story of an incompetent detective. One whose failure to perform even the most basic of due diligence required (more on that in a moment) amounts to hundreds of pages of watching someone metaphorically fall down stairs.

The second interpretation is that Seanan McGuire can write well enough to keep you interested, but otherwise has no idea how to move a plot along. The story bumbles on well beyond what is necessary, to such an extent that for the second time in a row the plot is only resolved as follows: "Insert blatant affirmation of murderer by co-conspirator at the very end". The plot actually resolves itself in this case because there is no one left standing by the end. October actually runs out of suspects and she still can't solve the crime.

This second interpretation is further supported by the fact that a closer examination of the plot reveals not a whole lot. Nothing really happens. October gets coffee. October is challenged by a red herring. October correctly interprets red herring as pointless waste of time. Does this deter her from risking life and limb performing a completely, utterly and entirely unnecessary ritual to confirm what she already knows? No. No it does not.

And that's literally what happens. The questions I had at the end of the book were those I posed above: Is October's stupidity a function of character portrayal or a consequence of Seanan's inability to draw the plot together? Let's look at a few examples.

Basic due diligence: I'm no detective. In fact, the extent of my detective sensibilities begins and ends with a bachelors class on auditing financial statements. Yet from that class, I gleamed some basics: perform due diligence. Build a case profile. Who are the suspects? What do they do in the company? What projects are they working on? I cannot stress this one enough, because it literally would have solved the entire mystery in three seconds: WHAT IS THE JOB DESCRIPTION OF EVERY INDIVIDUAL? Really, October? You've been a detective for decades and you can't be bothered to go through something as accessible and readily available as an employee dossier?

Wait! Hold on! She does that! In fact, October and /two other people/ go through every employee profile-- in a company staffed by no more than EIGHT PEOPLE-- twice. Twice! And they learn nothing! In fact, October can't even be bothered to ask the most basic of all questions: What do you do here? What project are you working on? It's clear from the get go that there is something going on that's very recently caused deaths in identical fashion. And it's very, very clear from the beginning that it's all related to what the company in question was doing prior to October's arrival.

It's worth pointing out that the employees in question are so absolutely neurotic about fine detail that they record everything. Everything. They kept the feathers of a crow-fae long after she left the corporation.

If that is not clue enough, at one point one character says to October: "You need to ask me about what we were doing when you wake up. Please. Ask me. I have to tell you all the secrets I've been keeping from you. Please ask me." Why was she asleep, you wonder? Well, in an environment where the murder rate is about one employee per sixteen hours, October decides to ignore with impunity those galling mundane tactics in favor of a life-threatening ritual. From this ritual, she learns /nothing/. Nothing at all. And then she has to sleep to recuperate, a sleep long enough that statistically someone should die.

And they do. Someone actually dies in the interim because October is too dense to plug and chug the formula A + B = C. Who, you may ask? Why, the person who was begging October to ask the questions she should have asked a few days before more people died. Does she follow up on this? Does she do this? No. No she does not. She doesn't bother to ask the employees about their dark project, despite it having been glaringly obvious from about page 60, until a few pages before one character drops the ball and admits everything.

Most horrifying of all, you actually repeatedly sit inside October's mind and watch her struggle to piece together evidence. She actually asks: "How could that happen?" or "She can do that? Interesting" and then fails to draw a conclusion upon which to base a sentence warranting arrest. That kind of behavior is tolerable only when a teacher is instructing a student tackling a particularly difficult field. But when coming from a seasoned detective? It's basic logical analysis and it's not particularly hard when the blame can only be spread around a pool of three people.

What's next? Another red herring, in which we learn that one employee apparently thought it was a good idea to balance her checkbook at work. Usually that's irrelevant, but this employee apparently thought nothing of bringing envelopes full of cash given to her by a rival noble from another kingdom for spying on the company she works for. You've all done that, right? I'm sure Apple's spies in Microsoft regularly flip through their bankrolls at the office and then painstakingly record their ill-gotten gains in easy-to-read checkbook entries labeled "TREASON MONEY".

As is usually the case with Seanan McGuire, this actually goes nowhere and is completely irrelevant. Other than being mildly unsurprising (Fae are notorious for subterfuge in just about every portrayal of them since Shakespeare, right?), it simply brings to question the author's writing talents. I mean, is this seriously the story of an inept detective who only gets it right when it has no meaning? Or is this the patter of an author whose plots can basically be summarized as "Mystery is made appallingly obvious, October fails to see, October fails to perform research, October gets coffee and then runs around, everyone hugs October, murderer admits all"? There's really a grim humor to either interpretation, but the former really makes a show out of watching October's stupidity cause her great pain.

If you can appreciate that kind of reading, which for the sake of the author I'm going to assume is completely unintentional, then read this book. It's worth 5 stars if you enjoy watching a detective with clue-dyslexia stumble through a plot blazing with neon signs. If you can't separate the author's inability to draw her character through a plot of believable events that would provoke clever responses from someone who is supposed to be a highly experienced mystery solver... then this book is worth 2 stars and is not for you.

After reading the first book in this series and enjoying it greatly, I was really looking forward to this one. First off, it did keep my attention enough for me to be able to finish it off in just a couple of days. But...I felt very disappointed afterwards. I felt McGuire did the heroine, October Daye, a great injustice when she wrote her in as a bumbling detective. Tobie was orginally written as a character with many decades of experience as a detective. Not only that, she was awarded Knighthood in her realm. Someone of this caliber should not have made the mistakes she made. McGuire instead played the story out like an Agatha Christie novel where everyone is dying on the Bullet Express and the killer is not found until a measly three suspects are left (actually two and a half). Hmm, I wonder who it could be? Then to top it off, she has to have the murderer tell all at gunpoint at the end. "Yea, I did it, that's right, and I'd do it again. Muhahahaha!"

What made me finish off the book so fast, you ask? Tybalt. He started off the story and it has been sooooooo obvious to all the readers and not the heroine that he has the hots for her. I kept reading to find out if the V8 can was going to knock her in the forhead or not. Or not. So that was a bit of a disappointment to me, also. I don't like my main characters so dumb. Authors need to get a clue.

Will I read the next one? Sure. I thought the first was great and orginal. I'm going to hope this second one was a fluke.