Read This: Hard Magic

Yesterday, Tor.com published an interview I did with Laura Anne Gilman, focused primarily on her latest novel, Hard Magic. It’s the first book in a series called “Paranormal Scene Investigations,” about a young Talent (we don’t call them “witches”) who joins a new agency that’s looking to develop a form of forensic magic to solve crimes perpetrated by and against the supernatural community.

So Bonnie Torres is plunged into an all-new work environment, forced to sort out the office dynamics even as the PSI team gets its first case—and as some within the “Cosa Nostradamus” (as the supernatural community of Laura Anne’s contemporary fantasy novels is called, springing off an earlier series of novels) make it abundantly clear they don’t want an independent agency poking into their affairs. Laura Anne moves the story at a brisk clip—this is a good place to start if you haven’t read her contemporaries before; even though the storyline runs concurrently to her Retrievers series, it does so in a way that requires no previous knowledge, and should even contain surprises for long-time fans.

3 August 2010 | read this |