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![Magic In the Blood (Allie Beckstrom Book 2) by [Devon Monk]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51bEqYMGTCL._SY346_.jpg)
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"Xxxx held very, very still in my Freeze spell and Zayvion slit his throat with one vicious stroke."
Reviewed in the United States on May 18, 2011
Allie Beckstrom's life is in turmoil. Nothing new here, but this time it's just a mess. Allie is a "Hound", that is, she is a practitioner of magic, and she uses her olfactory senses to detect and use magic. After "Magic To The Bone"'s ending where she expends an extreme amount of magic, Allie is now recuperating from a magic induced coma. It seems that for every time that somebody uses magic, that magic will demand an equal payment from the users, and that this payment takes the form of physical and psychic abuse. This time, the magic expended by Allie in "Magic To The Bone" has not only put Allie into a coma, but when she wakes she finds that most of the events of the previous month, including her affair with Zayvion Jones, has been scrubbed from her mind. And here is where the story starts. After being released from the hospital, and while taking a bus to the police station to give her statement, an old enemy accosts her. "Magic In The Blood" is a direct sequel to `The Sweet Smell Of Cherries' in the anthology "Crime Spells" that was edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Loren L. Coleman. In that story Allie had saved the granddaughter of influential Hound Martin Pike, and had put Lou Trager, the local drug lord, who had tortured and raped her in jail. Well, guess what, he's out, and after taking a blood sample from her, he tells her that she had better deliver to him Martin Pike by the next midnight or else she's dead meat. Shaken by not stopped, she continues to the station where she is introduced to Detective Paul Stotts, who heads up the city's elite Magical Enforcement Response Corp (MERC) who, after she gives him her statement, wants her to do a job for him. This is to investigate a series of disappearances of young girls, they are being disappeared in broad daylight, in front of witnesses, and blood magic is involved. A sub-plot to this is that sixteen Hounds in six years have suspiciously died while in Stotts employ, and by the novel's ending there will be seventeen dead. Will that seventeenth be Allie? If that wasn't enough, Martin Pike finds and convinces her to attend a meeting of Pike's Hounds, a loose confederation of Hounds that meet every week to pass on information about jobs, and to be of help to others. Here she meets Davy Silvers, Pike's right hand man, and Tomi, Davy's ex-girlfriend who's a cutter and is nursing one gigantic chip on her shoulder. It is after her initial meeting with his loose coterie of hounds that she informs Pike that Trager is gunning for him. Allie's love interest in the last novel was the tall, dark and handsome practitioner of magic Zayvian Jones who is also a troubleshooter and problem solver. Because she has lost all memories involving him, so for the first half of the novel he's regulated to a minor role with only a few cameos. Zayvion becomes more important later on, and as such, his character becomes more dominate in the second half. Because Jones is regulated to cameos in the first half of the novel, the attraction between Allie and Zayvion is forced to be toned down from the more passionate previous relationship. Now, because of her loss of memories, their relationship has to be rebuilt, and while Allie's panties are on fire, Zayvian is wearing his underpants of steel and wants to rebuild the relationship slowly. Monk takes the time to introduce and develop a number of important, and soon to be important, characters. Like Pike, a ready to retire Hound, Davy, Pike's loyal lieutenant, her younger mother-in-law Violet, the creepy next door neighbor Frank Gordon, and most importantly, we find out more about her dead father Daniel Beckstrom. Daniel Beckstrom being the man, before his death, behind the technology that allowed people to obtain and use, in a minor way, the great wells of magic that rest beneath the ground. In "Magic To The Bone" Daniel was killed mysteriously through blood magic. Daniel is now appearing, spectrelike to Allie to deliver some fairly obtuse epithets. And along with his ghost, Allie is seeing other, and different ghosts, and these, the "watercolor" people, are dangerous as they want to viciously and hungrily feed on Allie and her magic. Life is complicated, and Allie's is a mess, and before the novel's ending there will be death, destruction, betrayal, torture, blood, pain, and some very, very bad coffee. And like the first book in this series, this book can be read as a stand-alone, but it is also the first story in a two-novel arc. Allie's life will now take a new direction as circumstances will force Allie to abandon her lone wolf persona and take an active interest in Pike's Hounds, her father's corporation, and Stott's MERC group. Allie character is full of dark, cynical, and self-depreciating commentary, the novel is dark and hard, a testament to Monk's sense of realism. She doesn't shy away from either the blood or the violence of the storyline, but neither is she needlessly gory or exploitive. Monk is becoming a better and more confident novelist. Her novel this time around has a more complex storyline, and her writing is more cinematic, combining the genres of horror, urban fantasy, crime, occult comic book, and action, much more than her previous novel, all while furthering the development of her characters. Also hints of the epic storyline that the series will have a start appearing in this novel. And Monk further develops magic-as-a-metaphor for drug abuse. Dumb cover, and it illustrates nothing.For this site I have reviewed the previous Allie Beckstom appearances:'The Sweet Smell Of Cherries' a short story in the anthology Crime Spells. The novels:1.) Magic to the Bone (Allie Beckstrom, Book 1)3.) Magic in the Shadows (Allie Beckstrom, Book 3)4.) Magic on the Storm (Allie Beckstrom, Book 4)5.) Magic at the Gate (Allie Beckstrom, Book 5) And these similarly themed novels by Margaret Ronald:Genevieve "Evie" Scelan #1: Spiral Hunt (Evie Scelan)Genevieve "Evie" Scelan #2: Wild Hunt
Reviewed in the United States on May 18, 2011
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Claire Mill
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 14, 2010
