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When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

Reactor

Jace Valchek used to be an FBI agent in the here and now, until she was
 stolen—literally—by a magic-based law enforcement agency from another 
reality. Now she is known as the Bloodhound. She is the only criminal
 profiler in a U.S. shared by humans, vampires, werewolves, and an 
underclass of golems created to do menial labor. “Shared,” in this 
case, is a relative term: humans make up less than one percent of the 
population of this world, and it is widely expected that in the
 not-too-distant future, they may become extinct.

The reason Jace was grabbed by the National Security Agency was so she 
could help capture a human terrorist, Aristotle Stoker. Aristotle is 
descended from the famous vampire hunter, Bram Stoker, and as volume three of the Bloodhound Files series Killing Rocks opens, he is still at large. Until Jace catches him, she can’t go
 home—so, in the meantime, she’s been chasing serial killers along with 
her golem partner Charlie, an impassive, snappily dressed killing machine. 



When Stoker finally surfaces, he is in cahoots with a mysterious 
sorcerer, Asher, who seems to be at the heart of every truly terrible 
spell ever enacted in this world. Asher had a hand in the creation of 
the first golems. He organized the massive human sacrifice that allowed
 vampires to have children, and he was instrumental in Jace’s abduction. 
If she and Charlie can capture both Asher and Stoker, she can finally
 return to her old life in our (comparatively dull) world.

Naturally, Stoker and Asher have other ideas. 



I have been waiting for Killing Rocks with crazed anticipation ever
 since I learned its title, which led me to assume it would be an 
all-about-Charlie extravaganza. Urban fantasy is full of deeply 
interesting vampires and werewolves, but the golem isn’t something you
 see every day, and author DD Barant’s take on them is unique and 
delightful. I fell hard for Charlie as soon as I learned that he’s a big 
bag of sand animated by the spirit of a tyrannosaurus rex. What’s not to
 love, right?


But Charlie’s not the focus of Killing Rocks, at least not in quite the 
way I imagined. I suppose if I’d given much thought to what I expected, 
it would have been some kind of epic navel-gazing, angst-plumbing, Very 
Deep thing, where his Past Catches Up With Him. In fact, he’s caught up 
in one of Asher’s plots early in the story, and Jace is forced to team
 up with someone else, an Astonisher named Azura. This doesn’t mean that
 Killing Rocks is in any way a bad book, or even lacking in Charlie
 content. In fact, I was entirely happy to have my expectations 
challenged. Azura is a con-artist with great sleight-of-hand skills, who
 has been working in Las Vegas as an exotic dancer. She’s devious, a
 serious trickster, and the two make a bravura team.

DD Barant builds interesting worlds and populates them with great
 characters, but what I love most about this series is the quirky, and
 often twisted, sense of humor that pervades them. The banter is
 razor-sharp, and there’s something to draw a laugh on almost every page. At the same time, Barant is staking out some intriguing terrain as 
Jace’s story moves into material that has usually been the province of 
comic books. In Death Blows, we find out that comics are powerful 
magical artifacts in Jace’s adopted reality, so much so that they aren’t 
even legal. Now, in Killing Rocks, she must deal with the tendency of
 comics-based magic to spiral off alternate universes, infinite versions
 of people, and to reduce any character’s death to a temporary setback. Asher and people like him have the potential to shred a whole
 functioning universe, to “retcon” its entire history.

As a result, Barant has produced something that isn’t exactly 
metafiction or slipstream, though it has traces of both genres. It also 
means this particular fantasy universe is an especially complicated and
 thoroughly unpredictable place, one whose rules can change at a moment’s notice. There are no guarantees for Jace by the end of Killing Rocks: 
her life has become an endless effort to juggle flasks of nitroglycerin
 while sprinting over hot coals, racing to catch Stoker and get home 
before one or both worlds—or she herself—is changed irrevocably.


A.M. Dellamonica writes novels and short fiction and teaches writing online. She is passionate about environmentalism, food and drink, and art in every form, and dabbles in several: photography, choral music, theater, dance, cooking and crafts. Catch up with her on her blog here.

About the Author

About Author Mobile

Alyx Dellamonica

Author

I live in Vancouver, B.C. and make my living writing science fiction and fantasy; I also review books and teach writing online at The UCLA Writers' Extension Program. I'm a legally married lesbian; my wife's name is Kelly and we have two cats, Rumble and Minnow.
Learn More About Alyx
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