So far I had the god of evil and the god of terror on my side. My good-guy image was taking a serious beating. Maybe I should recruit some unicorns or kittens with rainbow powers to even us out.
GRADE: A-
When we last left our heroine, urban fantasy mercenary Kate Daniels, she had lost most of her hair and various skin to a fight with a monstrous ifrit, discovered that a substantial portion of her friends at the Keep had moved into her neighborhood, and agreed to marry Curran. Oh, yes, and from prior books we know she and her father are now… well, the word “talking” isn’t wrong, but doesn’t have enough familial angst connoted in it.
In Magic Binds, things are much more personal. With their relationship now out in the open, Roland can’t stop pushing against Kate, of which the well-documented-on-the-cover business of Saiman being kidnapped and tortured is an obvious part. But the book-blurb got it wrong. This plot is really not about Saiman. This is about the Witch Oracles calling Kate to say that either Curran or the couple’s son-to-be is going to die horribly at Roland’s hands in the next two weeks, and Atlanta is going to burn. So Kate has to figure out how to miraculously change all of her future paths. Immediately. Oh, and she still has to get through the wedding-planning process, too, which provides some humorous punctuation to the magic and action.
Magic Binds feels a lot like a plot-braiding book, and is almost only the first half of a book when the climax comes around and mostly goes “poof.” But that’s okay. There are a lot of little pieces that we’ve had rolling around for a few books that got air, like Jim’s changing attitudes, Nick’s hatred of Roland, what Saiman knows about Kate, and Barabas’s ambitions. Kate started dealing with the consequences of having claimed Atlanta and having directly defied Roland, which are two separate concepts with separate baggage to unpack. (Boy howdy is there familial baggage!) Curran got to throw his snark around and put his amazing uber-lion warrior form to good use. And a few of the secondary characters that I love get a lot of screen time, including Roman, Teddy Jo, and Christopher. Yeah, no spoilers, but Christopher is something special this time. And so is the scene with the tutu. Enjoy!
Magic Binds (Kate Daniels #9) by Ilona Andrews
Urban Fantasy | Ace | September 20, 2016