Almost forgot: Embers, by Laura Bickle

[warriorofworry]

I really hate writing negative reviews.

Embers has an enormously inventive universe, based in decaying urban Detroit, a well-plotted storyline, and an engaging heroine. I really wanted to love this first work from Laura Bickle. Ultimately, though, it’s a disappointment.
Anya, a twenty-something arson investigator and full-time medium, bears pervasive guilt that as a child, she caused the fire that killed her mother. Like the guilt, she wears her mother’s legacy – the copper collar that is home to her familiar, a fire spirit named, (pun warning) Sparky. Invisible to most, Sparky is equal parts pet, dangerous annoyance, and unwanted chaperone.
As the story opens, Anya is trying to extricate herself from a psychic investigation team. But as a “Lantern”, a psychic that devours ghosts, she may be irreplaceable. She’s been called in to subdue a malignant haunting - a demon - but the aftermath leaves her injured and puts a colleague that might be a love interest in the hospital.
Work isn’t any less complicated. The serial arsonist she’s investigating moves from mere property damage to murder as the city prepares for the chaos of Devil’s Night, and she’s assigned to a team with a pompous, hostile police detective. She tracks down her suspect, another Lantern, through magic and diligent investigation. But magic isn’t a reality to her co-workers.   Despite what the Lantern reveals to her about his plans to revive an ancient fire deity, the police let him go. Anya is forced off the team, and turns to her friends to investigate and stop the suspect’s plot.
Anya is a fully realized character, and Bickle does an excellent job on the emotional conflict Anya feels when faced with the villain, a man who would be, in almost all ways, her perfect lover. She does less well with her secondary characters, especially the purported love interest.
Worse, the text was chock full of clunky, illogical sentences that dropped me right out of the story.
Mind you, I’m not any kind of snob about writing. My tolerance for typos grew from a misspent youth devouring poorly edited paperbacks. Story –the characters - are far more important than arcane rules of grammar. After all, Stephen King and Laurell K. Hamilton, both of whom can bludgeon a riveting story with questionable prose, are New York Times bestsellers.
Ms. Bickle hasn’t made it there yet. I knew I was in trouble on the first page, when the description of a haunted house left me confused. “Cables from the beat-up panel van parked curbside snaked under the front door, but no light shined inside.” (P1) Where didn’t the light shine? In the house, the van, the cables or the front door? 
Could be that I’m too picky.  I read on, brushing aside similar issues as the plot absorbed me. 
But then, describing a church service for a murdered fireman’s funeral at which Anya is seated far away from the altar: “The archbishop, a small man in a blindingly white robe and stole, seemed to blend in with the limestone interior, cut as sharply as the stone.” (P146)  Eh? Blinding and blended don’t go together. I get the intent, but it took a moment.
Each of the many sentences and paragraphs that failed to make sense distanced me more and more from the story. 
But this, for me, shredded any remaining credibility: “He picked her up, setting her on the edge of the table. She wrapped her legs around his waist, feeling his tongue thrusting in her mouth and his desire pressing against her belly.” (P292)
I couldn’t tell Anya that men’s “desires” don’t spring from above their waist. But I wished I could.  
The climax of the story almost redeemed it, even if replete with romance tropes. I’d read more of this author’s work, and more about this character, but I sincerely hope that the next book gets a better edit.