Pacific Fire by Greg van Eekhout

I have not been reading as much as I usually do the last little while. I'm not really sure why, except for the extreme busyness of the world, and the temptations of playing on an iPad when I get home instead of curling up with a book because my brain is just done. We'll see if it changes in the new year. However, I still manage to read on my lunch hours, and it didn't take very many of those for me to devour Pacific Fire.

It has been quite a gap since I read California Bones, but it was a book I recommended to several people who like weird Americana in their fantasy. Particularly my husband, since he's run games set in L.A. before, and I thought he'd enjoy the references very much indeed.

We are now more than a decade later, after Daniel Blackland devoured half the heart of the Hierarch of Los Angeles, and escaped with the golem that the Hierarch had been grooming to take over. The golem, Sam, is magic in his very bones, and almost everyone who is still a power in L.A. would like to consume him, and no, that is not an euphemism.

Daniel and Sam have been on the run for that long, moving frequently, when Daniel gets an inside tip that certain powers inside LA - including his treacherous "uncle," Otis, are trying to raise a Pacific Firedrake with which to bathe their enemies in fire of the most magical sort. Daniel is less than impressed with this plan, and decides to go stop it.

Before he can do so, though, he is gravely wounded, and although Daniel has been trying to keep Sam well away from those who want to eat his flesh to gain his magic, Sam decides that this danger is worth risking his own life, and with the aid of one of the Emmas (a group of women of various ages who are all sort of the same person but not - I know that's confusing, but read both books and it makes sense), Sam sets off for L.A.

Daniel wakes up and goes after him, and we have a mix of Daniel's old heist team and Sam's new venture, both vectors ending up where the firedrake skeleton rests awaiting incarnation.

Those are the bones of the story, but they're fleshed out with a story of surrogate family, and ways in which parents can hurt their children without meaning to, either involuntarily, or, in one case, entirely voluntarily. As a golem of someone else, finding an identity is more than complicated, particularly when the original is still around. Or when the original was the most powerful man on the West Coast for a very long time.

I think I may have liked the heistiness of the first book a little bit more than the adventures that happen in the second, but both are very solid books, and the world and magic van Eekhout creates around Los Angeles is really excellent. It's a nice twist, just a little off the real world, with a system of magic that is brutal and unique.

I can't talk about the ending without spoiling the whole book, but it was both a little unexpected and very fitting. Who knows what might happen next to those who remain?