Tricks for Free by Seanan McGuire (DAW)
Seanan McGuire’s “InCryptid” series just keeps getting
better, her world-building more detailed, and her characters growing and
changing as they struggle against inner as well as outer demons. Antimony Price
comes from a family of cryptozoologists, dedicated to the study, protection,
and sometimes containment of “incryptids,” creatures like Bigfoot, but who live
disguised as humans. The last episode, Magic
for Nothing, sent Antimony undercover, infiltrating the Covenant of St.
George (yes, the dragonslayer), whose
aim is the destruction of all incryptids, no matter how benign. While in
disguise and investigating a traveling carnival, she met Sam, a trapeze artist
whose natural form resembles a graceful simian. Sparrow Hill Road, a related novel, introduced us to the world of
road ghosts, crossroads bargains, and route-witches, many of which play crucial
roles in this new novel.
Now, at the beginning of Tricks
for Free, Antimony is on the run from the Covenant and hiding from her
family. As she says:
I never wanted my life to be a wacky sitcom about a human girl and her inhuman roommates struggling to get by at what many people consider to be the second-happiest place in the world.
She’s taken a job working for Lowryland, a
not-quite-second-rate Disneyland. Sharing an employer-provided apartment are
her friends Fern (a sylf capable of altering her physical density), who enacts
one of the many Fairyland princesses, and Megan, a (Pliny’s) gorgon, who in
real life is a medical resident. In between the byzantine company politics, trying
to stay off the Covenant’s radar and also to not burn down the theme park with
her increasingly erratic ability to set fires, Antimony unearths a secret cabal
of witches and sorcerers bent upon harvesting the good luck of the patrons to
boost their own power. Things go awry as one terribly unlucky accident leads to
another. Then Sam shows up, as well as various ghostly aunts, and the plot
races right along.
McGuire writes complex, interconnected series in which every
(or almost every) volume stands on its own, fast-paced, absorbing, and
satisfying. She weaves in backstory and setting with such a deft touch that the
reader is neither baffled nor inundated by chunks of indigestible exposition.
Although I had read Magic for Nothing
and Sparrow Hill Road fairly recently
and enjoyed the references, I think Tricks
for Free would work just as well as an introduction. So even if you’re new
to the delights of the InCryptid and road ghost worlds, dive right in for a
great read.
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