This week’s books are the latest releases in two Urban Fantasy series that I’ve been following happily for a long time now. I ordered both of them in advance and I’m looking forward to diving in.

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‘Magic Claims’ by Ilona Andrews (2023)

I was delighted when, in January this year, Ilona Andrews re-booted the Kate Daniels series with the novella ‘Magic Tides’, a fun story that relocated Kate and Curren from Atlanta to Wilmington and saw them being spectacularly unsuccessful at building new low-profile lives for themselves.

‘Magic Tides’ was classic Kate Daniels but freed from the weight of all the politics and complex conflicts that she dragged behind her in Atlanta. Kate got to make a new beginning in a new place with no pack, just her husband and her son. 

Of course, Kate is still Kate so her new home is a faux castle, abandoned by a billionaire pre-shift, which she’s now turning into a defensible Keep and Conlan is his father’s son so he has to go to a school that can cope with shifters and even then, Kate had to explain to the administrator that, in the unlikely event that eight-year-old Conlan goes on the rampage, the best thing would be to hide and wait for one of his parents to arrive.

I’m glad that I’ve only had to wait a few months for the second instalment in ‘Kate Daniels: Wilmington Years’ to arrive. ‘Magic Claims‘ is 240 pages long so it counts as a full novel. Even so, I’m sure I’ll burn my way through it in a day or two.

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‘Winter’s Gifts’ by Ben Aaronovitch (2023)

I read the first ‘Rivers Of London’ book almost exactly ten years ago and I’ve been a fan ever since. Even so, it sometimes feels to me that the main story arc around Peter Grant is in danger of stalling. Peter’s life is becoming cosy and domestic, even if he is married to a real river Goddess, Nightingale’s character seems grossly under-used and the relationship with Lesley May is getting very complicated.

I’m sure that Ben Aaronovitch will work his magic and sort it all out… eventually.

In the meantime, it seems to me that some of the best of his energy is being spent on Side Quests that expand the Rivers of London universe without having to bear the weight of Peter Grant’s nine-novel-long personal history.

It started with ‘The October Man’ (2019) which followed Tobias Winter, an Investigator with the Abteilung KDA (the German equivalent of The Folly) and one of only two licensed magical practitioners in Germany. as he investigated the death of a man in Trier of whose corpse had been found covered in a strange fungus.

Then we had ‘What Abigail Did That Summer’ (2021) which was a delightful novella following Peter’s cousin and self-appointed apprentice, Abigail Kamara as she spent an unsupervised summer developing her magic while tracking down ghosts with the help of talking foxes. I loved her tagline: Abigail Kamala – ghost hunter, fox whisperer, troublemaker.

‘Winter’s Gifts’ (2023) takes us across the Atlantic to see Peter Grant’s FBI contact, Special Agent Kimberley Reynolds, investigating a report of strange goings on in snowbound Northern Wisconsin.

I’m hoping that this will be fresh, energetic, chilly fun.