The Night Raven

"I love this book. I believe Painter’s Crow Investigations series is self-published, and it’s such a fun series: classic urban fantasy with a kick-ass heroine. I always have the next one pre-ordered, and I’m so happy when it comes out into my Kindle. It’s about a woman who’s a private investigator, and trying to be on the straight and narrow, but she’s from this very mafia-esque supernatural family. They are part of the Crow family – and I love everything crow, I’m one of those sad nerds that just secretly wants to befriend the crows. There are three other families, and they’ve carved up London. They have the characteristic of their names, so the Crow family have powers of deception – very good at sleight of hand, can tell when people are not telling the truth, that kind of stuff. It’s not super magical, especially at the beginning; magic is an undercurrent. In fact, part of the world-building is that the powers have been waning, and suddenly magic is burgeoning again – and part of the mystery is, why? Each book has its own mystery at the heart of it. And there’s an overarching series question about this magic reappearing – someone’s clearly stirring something up. So, they’re very satisfying as individual standalone books and very satisfying as a series. I highly recommend. I think part of it is that from a craft standpoint, mysteries are just great plots. Mysteries and romances are very clear formats. When I started writing my first book, it fell into the mystery plot, because that’s just very straightforward. With fantasy , science fiction , even horror , anything could happen – unless you’re writing within a specific sub-genre, like epic. So, I think a lot of us look for a plot format to hang our hat on, and mystery is very accessible and fun. You can have straight mysteries with a human murderer but a supernatural element – ‘paranormal cosies’ – like those written by Juliet Blackwell . The fun of a paranormal element is that it throws everything off. I just watched Death in Venice , the Kenneth Branagh version, and the supernatural element throws a wrench in: Is this really happening? Is it not?"