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Alexis Hall is one of my go-to queer romance authors--he has a great, wide range of genre interests and often likes to write about prickly or damaged characters, both of which are great for me. His Kate Kane series is a lesbian riff on paranormal romance/urban fantasy conventions, and it combines tongue-in-cheek satire with dark and wondrous worldbuilding while throwing everything at you but the kitchen sink. It's kind of a mess, but it's an enjoyable mess that feels like being dropped into someone's iddy f/f dream canon.
Kate Kane is a PI whose partner (named Archer, for you Maltese Falcon fans) has recently been murdered under complicated circumstances. She's been in an emotional rut ever since and is down on her luck enough that she breaks one of her hard-line rules and agrees to work for a vampire. (This is a world where supernatural creatures are not openly known, but Kate never spends any time with anyone who isn't in the know, so it's virtually irrelevant--it's mostly just a hand-wave as to why they can't go to the police.) See, when Kate was sixteen, she dated a vampire named Patrick, an Edward Cullen send-up who drew her into a realm of unending melodrama and even now sometimes breaks into her apartment to leave drawings of her on the pillow next to her head. The last thing Kate wants is more of that. But all the same, when Julian Saint-Germaine, the vampire Prince of Cups (the title doesn't correspond to the holder's gender), hires her to look into the matter of a werewolf murdered at one of Julian's nightclubs, Kate's desperate enough to take it.
Also, Julian is wickedly attractive and begins hitting on Kate at once, in the way of vampires in paranormal romances:
"You distracted me," she complained, as though it was somehow my fault that she'd jumped all over me. "There's a dead body in the alley outside."
"And it just slipped your mind?"
"No, I just decided to seduce you first."
"Corpse first."
"He's dead, he's not going anywhere."
"You're dead."
"Yes, but I'm better in bed."
Julian eventually proves to be the main love interest of this volume, at least, but Kate is constantly tripping over model-gorgeous supernatural women who are hot for her, you know, as you do: there's Tara, the posh head of the local werewolf pack; Elsie, her late-in-the-book acquired assistant who is a statue who was brought to life; Nimue, a friend of hers who is the head of the mages... and so on. And then you also have Patrick, lurking around broodily and annoying her; a reformed ex-incubus; a trans werewolf; a vampire drag artist who was dating the murdered werewolf; and, of course, Kate's mother, the Faerie Queen of the Hunt, who has imbued Kate with special, dangerous powers that will gradually consume her the more she uses them and who is always lurking in the back of Kate's mind, hinting that she might one day take over entirely. And, arguably best of all, there's a collective of rats that sometimes disguise themselves as people in your basic three-kids-in-a-trenchcoat-gag and communicate with each other telepathically. I think from all this you can see that there is way too much going on here--I still have not mentioned that Julian is a former twelfth century ninja nun who fought demons--and that the plot gets muddied and over-complicated. But Hall is very good at throwing delightful things at you to distract you from that.
The Kate/Julian romance happened too quickly for my tastes, but I liked their banter a lot, and they have a lot of shippy potential. That's what I mean about this feeling like a fan-made canon--there's less development here than is typical for Hall, in my experience, but there's just potential exploding out everywhere in a way that's pretty attractive all on its own. All in all, great fun and eminently likable.
Kate Kane is a PI whose partner (named Archer, for you Maltese Falcon fans) has recently been murdered under complicated circumstances. She's been in an emotional rut ever since and is down on her luck enough that she breaks one of her hard-line rules and agrees to work for a vampire. (This is a world where supernatural creatures are not openly known, but Kate never spends any time with anyone who isn't in the know, so it's virtually irrelevant--it's mostly just a hand-wave as to why they can't go to the police.) See, when Kate was sixteen, she dated a vampire named Patrick, an Edward Cullen send-up who drew her into a realm of unending melodrama and even now sometimes breaks into her apartment to leave drawings of her on the pillow next to her head. The last thing Kate wants is more of that. But all the same, when Julian Saint-Germaine, the vampire Prince of Cups (the title doesn't correspond to the holder's gender), hires her to look into the matter of a werewolf murdered at one of Julian's nightclubs, Kate's desperate enough to take it.
Also, Julian is wickedly attractive and begins hitting on Kate at once, in the way of vampires in paranormal romances:
"You distracted me," she complained, as though it was somehow my fault that she'd jumped all over me. "There's a dead body in the alley outside."
"And it just slipped your mind?"
"No, I just decided to seduce you first."
"Corpse first."
"He's dead, he's not going anywhere."
"You're dead."
"Yes, but I'm better in bed."
Julian eventually proves to be the main love interest of this volume, at least, but Kate is constantly tripping over model-gorgeous supernatural women who are hot for her, you know, as you do: there's Tara, the posh head of the local werewolf pack; Elsie, her late-in-the-book acquired assistant who is a statue who was brought to life; Nimue, a friend of hers who is the head of the mages... and so on. And then you also have Patrick, lurking around broodily and annoying her; a reformed ex-incubus; a trans werewolf; a vampire drag artist who was dating the murdered werewolf; and, of course, Kate's mother, the Faerie Queen of the Hunt, who has imbued Kate with special, dangerous powers that will gradually consume her the more she uses them and who is always lurking in the back of Kate's mind, hinting that she might one day take over entirely. And, arguably best of all, there's a collective of rats that sometimes disguise themselves as people in your basic three-kids-in-a-trenchcoat-gag and communicate with each other telepathically. I think from all this you can see that there is way too much going on here--I still have not mentioned that Julian is a former twelfth century ninja nun who fought demons--and that the plot gets muddied and over-complicated. But Hall is very good at throwing delightful things at you to distract you from that.
The Kate/Julian romance happened too quickly for my tastes, but I liked their banter a lot, and they have a lot of shippy potential. That's what I mean about this feeling like a fan-made canon--there's less development here than is typical for Hall, in my experience, but there's just potential exploding out everywhere in a way that's pretty attractive all on its own. All in all, great fun and eminently likable.