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24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Fey Politics can be a dangerous game, July 28, 2009
This review is from: Skin Deep (Laura Blackstone, Book 1) (Mass Market Paperback)
In a world where Fey and human are one hundred years into an uneasy coexistence, after a mysterious convergence between Faerie and the mortal world, Laura Blackstone is a public relations director for the Fey Guild; druid Janice Crawford has been seconded to Washington DC SWAT to help out in operations where magical assistance is required; and Mariel Tate is one of the top officials at Intersec, the International Global Security Agency which deals with international criminal threats: they are also the same person. Operating under glamours - illusions which allow her to appear as someone else - Laura has crafted a range of different identities which allow her to work in Washington's law enforcement community and gather information as one of Intersec's most secret agents. It's a demanding life, needing constant care and attention to keep her various lives straight, and like all secret agents she faces the risk of burning out from the stresses of the job, but she feels she's doing good for both her people, and humanity.
A seemingly routine outing as Janice, however, to support SWAT in raiding a drug factory suspected of having Brownie back-up, ends up with Laura encountering a far more powerful opponent, an Inverni Fairy, and being shot, seemingly by one of her own team. It appears she has stumbled into something far more dangerous: a conspiracy reaching into both the human senate and the depths of Fey politics, and which has its roots in a long hidden injustice. It's going to take all of Laura's identities, and magical skills to stay alive and unravel the plot before it can reach its deadly climax.
Skin Deep is, we are told, the first of a series of novels Mark Del Franco has planned featuring Laura Blackstone, and in many ways it does seem to be setting the scene: there's the introduction of a variety of characters and hints at the development of a relationship for Laura, the plot which leaves various elements unresolved for the future, and a great deal of general scene-setting, none of which, it has to be said, Del Franco allows to get in the way of keeping the plot moving, covering everything in just under 300 pages.
As urban fantasies go, Skin Deep seems to have all the right ingredients: the blending of mythical beings with the modern world, a courageous yet isolated protagonist, a developing romance, nefarious plots and heroic deeds, and yet I have to say I found it somewhat uninvolving. Only Laura is well-developed as a character, and she still doesn't have much to distinguish her - even the hints that she may be have an incipient drink-problem seem more like a standard secret-agent quirk than a genuine character trait. Added to that, the plot, which has her doing a great deal of groping in the dark, while dodging assassination attempts on her various identities fails to really grip. On the other hand, setting the novel in the bear-pit of Washington, and making at least some of Laura's conflicts political rather than physical is a novel idea, and the suggestions of further developments to come in the history and political relations between the Fey is enough to excite some interest - and there's no doubt that it is an undemanding read and a pleasant enough way to spend a couple of hours if you're an urban fantasy fan.
Overall, then, I'm not sure whether I'll be obtaining the second volume of Laura's adventures when it comes out - most likely the answer will depend on whether I've got any other new purchases on my shelf at the time, which I want to read more.
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Mixed feelings, August 2, 2009
This review is from: Skin Deep (Laura Blackstone, Book 1) (Mass Market Paperback)
Laura Blackstone is a Druidess who is head of PR for the Fey Guild in Washington DC. She's also well to do Mariel Tate, an operative in the international intelligence agency with enough connections and respect to get high ranking DC officials to give her what she needs. And to help out the DC Swat Team, she's Janice Crawford of InterSec, a Druidess with limited powers struggling to make ends meet.
Laura has always done her best for the Guild and the various Fey agencies that interconnect, often creating a glamour and persona to go undercover and help out the other agencies. Juggling three at a time and keeping them separate is getting difficult and tiring, especially when there are only two people who are aware of it and neither one is her staff.
Janice is called in to take out two brownie guards for a drug operation when SWAT raids a drug house. But they'd purposely been fed misinformation and one of the brownies is actually an Inverni fairy glamoured to look like a brownie, but as powerful as Laura is. The whole thing goes sour and Sanchez, the man teamed up with Janice is shot in the neck. He's trying to tell her something when a bullet grazes her head. She's now got temporary amnesia and can recall everything except for who shot them and what Sanchez was trying to tell her before he died.
While juggling her personas and someone trying multiple times to kill Janice, they uncover something much larger than a drug operation that extends the story beyond this first book. The series is set in the same world as the Connor Grey series where a Convergence took place between the Fey and human realms and we now have the Fey living in this realm. Lots of politics with the different Fey factions.
Told from the first person POV, we don't know a great deal about the other characters, or for that matter, much about Laura, although even she admits she spends so much time in her different personas that she doesn't know who the real person is anymore. This makes for a somewhat uncomfortable read. But there are a number of action scenes that are well written and I couldn't guess where the major underlining mystery leads to.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Promising, but a little rushed, August 18, 2009
This review is from: Skin Deep (Laura Blackstone, Book 1) (Mass Market Paperback)
I like DelFranco's writing a lot, and have read all of his Connor Grey series so far.
The Laura Blackstone series starts off a bit rushed-- I felt like DelFranco couldn't be bothered to take the time to tell us about her back story, but also didn't go to the effort of smoothly working in that back story into the narrative. Perhaps he tried, but it didn't quite work well enough for me.
That said, I like the world he's built and think it's interesting to set a series of stories in another city of that universe-- specifically Washington, DC. The politics are just enough intrigue for my taste (not much), and as usual I really felt like the characters had some kind of lives outside the events of the story. The ending was particularly satisfying in that way, with some characters surprising Laura with their perceptiveness. And that Laura isn't necessarily the one who has to ultimately do *everything* to bring the book to a close was nice as well.
The identity-switching stuff didn't do much for me. I didn't feel like that was anything other than a cursory mechanism to move between parts of a story. The scenes involving the identities were all entertaining, it's just that Laura as an undercover agent and all the details and strategies and skills of being an undercover agent felt underserved by the writing. I guess may I feel that to do justice to all the ideas and topics brought up in this book, it should have been about 100 pages longer.
I'm looking forward to the next one, but I'm looking forward to the next Connor Grey novel a lot more.
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