Book Two in the The Section 13 Case Files series.
Tuulois MacColewyn's simple life performing dirty jobs for fey hiding in New York City has died a quick death. Consulting for the NYPD on a case involving child abductions, losing a friend, laying siege to a stronghold at the end of Broadway, and being chased through a hospital by animated scarecrows combined to make last month hell. This month is shaping up to be much worse.
Yet, it's not all bad. Cole has a new place to live, a steady-paying job working for the NYPD, and the heart of Inspector Joss Vallimun, head of Section Thirteen and, incidentally, Cole’s new boss.
Section Thirteen is understaffed and overworked, trying to solve every supernatural crime in New York, including a series of grisly child murders and evidence that local fey are being enslaved. When Vallimun is gravely injured just as the investigation reaches a fever pitch while a snowstorm blankets the city, Cole will need all the help he can get to have any hope of salvaging this month at all.
Tropes:
- Armored Closet Gay: Corhagen, full-stop. Though he doesn't pull this off as well as he thinks.
- Bigger Is Better in Bed: Subverted. Vallimun is described several times as being spectacularly well-endowed in one area of the body, yet a chapter roughly midway through focuses on he and Cole discussing how such a thing is more of a curse than a blessing. It is implied that one reason Vallimun enjoys being with Cole is due to his sidhe anatomy being able to take more punishment, and therefore can accommodate for Vallimun's size.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Daniel Whittaker this time. The abuse he suffers both at home and at school leaves him a broken mess, but then some ominous shadows tortured him further into becoming the monster he was.
- Dogged Nice Guy: Corhagen sees himself as this.
- Everybody Has Lots of Sex: Played straight in this book. The levels of steam are cranked up to eleven this time around.
- I Am What I Am: In the end, Whittaker embraces what he is. And gets a girlfriend, an age bonus, and cool superpowers out of it.
- I'm a Humanitarian: The story begins with two of the main characters searching for a serial killer who burns children alive before eating them.
- Living Shadow: Several of them near the end.
- The Omniscient Council of Vagueness: The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. They haven't been around long enough to qualify as an Ancient Conspiracy, but if this trope is played straight for the remainder of the series, you know this won't be the last we've seen of them!
- Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome: Whittaker goes through this as a result of bonding with a creature of angst.
- Suicide by Cop: Whittaker's master plan turns out to be this.
- Wild Child: Jynx has shades of this at first. She doesn't speak, leaving a Wood Goblin to fill in the blanks for people.
