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May Dayby Josie Jaffrey eARC, 388 pg. Read: September 14, 2020 |
What’s May Day About?
Our protagonist and narrator is a Silver, Jack Valentine. Silver’s the term that vampires in this reality use to describe themselves. But she’s no ordinary Silver, she’s a Seeker—essentially a vampire police detective. She and her colleagues in Oxford witness a Silver throwing a mortal to their death from a tower but are unable to immediately apprehend them.
Jack is forced to team up with a local baron—with whom she has a long-standing grudge–to gain the necessary social access to properly investigate the killing. Along the way, she finds a vampire who is molesting mortals (who, thankfully, won’t remember anything) and stumbles onto a conspiracy that may be too much for Jack and the other Seekers to adequately deal with.
A Great Idea
A group of vampires tasked with keeping the existence of vampires secret, erasing evidence of their existence whenever possible, and bringing reckless and criminal (by vampire, not mortal, standards) vampires to heel is a great idea. In retrospect, I’m surprised no one has thought of this before*.
* I realize I’m leaving myself open to correction on this point, if others have done this—let me know, I’d like to see other takes on this idea.
Jaffrey goes even a step further and gives us political intrigue and possible corruption in the upper echelons of both the Seekers and other bodies. The sort of thing that Harry Bosch would call “high jingo.” Establishing the Seekers and introducing some high jingo in a way that feels both realistic and mysterious is a nice accomplishment.
A Question of Emphasis
It’s entirely possible (perhaps probable) that word/page count would put the lie to this section. But I’m emphasizing on how it seemed to this reader—what my experience was. But I’d say that the crime/investigation story (the part that the Book Blurb talks about) is about 40% of the book. The other 60% focuses on Jack’s personal life (and a little about the personal lives of her colleagues).
Jack’s a relatively young vampire and is regarded as pretty immature. Which is fitting, because she is. She drinks to excess, regularly, and to an extent that threatens her job. She gets involved in a love triangle (or at least a lust triangle) that the text spends an awful lot of time on. The side of the triangle that Jaffrey spends the most time on—and gives the most details about—is the one that Jack tells everyone who asks (and the reader) repeatedly that she’s not interested in, and is dead-set against.
The idea of a cop (or cop-like character) who is a mess, both in their professional and personal life, is nothing new—and at times seems de rigueur. It’s just those sub-plots (however integral to the overall story they may prove) should serve as a support to the main plot—it’s right there in the “sub.” They should illustrate who the protagonist is, show them in a different light than the main plot (perhaps help explain who they seem to be). Here, it’s almost as if the May Day murder is the subplot.
So, what did I think about May Day?
I liked the concept of the Seekers, I thought the entire case was well-conceived and well-executed. The two (maybe three, it depends how you want to count them) other ongoing problems that Jack and the others uncover were both exactly the kinds of thing that “Vampire cops” should get into and both leave plenty of fodder for follow-up volumes. This part of the novel is strong, inventive, and is why I recommend May Day.
What tempers my enthusiasm is the balance of the book, Jack Valentine is an interesting character, but her love life and her personal dysfunctions and self-destructive tendencies are overemphasized. I’m very likely in the minority here, I realize, but spending as much time with the mess that is Jack’s personal life—especially when you throw in the triangle—it leaves me cold and sucks out some of my appreciation of the novel as a whole. I do recommend this original slant on Urban Fantasy, and think that UF reader will find a lot to enjoy in its pages.
My thanks to The Write Reads for the invitation to participate in this tour and the materials they provided.
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