Given that I talked about the mixing of the modern and the supernatural last time, it felt only fitting to
cover some of the books I read while preparing to publish my own
book. Call it market research, call it scoping out the competition, I
mainly just wanted to see what other urban fantasy stories were out
there; how they handled different aspects of the genre, what I liked
and what I didn't like. The results were...eye-opening, but not quite in the way I was expecting.
The first book I tried was from the October Daye series,
featuring a half-Fae private investigator. Now, don't think these are the cute little pixies that leap to mind when you first hear the word
“faerie”, these are capital-letters The Fae, ageless,
otherworldly beings connected with many aspects of nature that come
in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Our titular heroine is one of
many unlucky half-breeds in her world, born with the vulnerabilities
of both human and Fae without too many of the advantages. To her
credit, she decides the best course of is to take a unique
profession: ferreting out the lies of a race of chronic liars.
