Rosemary and Rue (October Daye: 1)

by Seanan McGuire
(2009 | 358 p)

October (Toby) Daye was an up-and-coming private investigator with a husband and young daughter at home counting on her to come back in one piece. And things were going well enough until she ran into a bad guy that put her out of commission for 14 years. Finally back on her own two feet, Toby's left with a new reality where her husband and daughter want nothing to do with her. Disillusioned with her old life, Toby's turned her back on the P.I. business and is barely making a go of it as an overnight cashier at the local convenience store. That is until Evelyn Winters, an old friend, is brutally murdered and it's up to Toby to find out who's responsible.

This sort of sounds like any other tough lady detective story, but Rosemary and Rue offers up a twist. Toby isn't just any other P.I., she's a changeling. Her mother was a pureblood fairy who decided to play housewife with a mortal man. The baddie that knocked her out of the loop for so long wasn't a standard villain, he was a pureblood who thought it would be amusing to turn Toby into a fish. She spent those 14 years in a koi pond with no recollection of who or what she truly was. Evelyn Winters was thousands of years old and, knowing her murder was coming soon, placed a curse on Toby. Toby is now compelled to solve this murder or she will be joining Ms. Winters in the great beyond.

This was a fun little urban fantasy, but parts of it left me a bit cold. In one scene Toby battles with a doppelgänger in her living room, a gun is hidden behind the curtain only a few feet away. Toby knows the gun is there, but rather than grab it she runs to her bedroom where there's no escape. If she's as smart and sassy as she's written, she would have made a dive for the gun. It made no sense. She also has a confusing love/hate relationship with a weirdo who runs a flop house where she used to live. It's made clear that the guy is a creep, requiring sex as payment for favors from most of his young wards. He's just slimy. And still our headstrong heroine is stealing kisses from him even as she's promising one of his new victims that she'll help her escape. I was baffled. It was a quick read and had won a Hugo, so I stuck through to the end. I don't regret that I read it but I doubt I'll be finishing the series.