Book Review: CrowBones

Crowbones by Anne Bishop
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

I love the world Anne Bishop has created in her Others series, and I was thrilled to get back to it. The tense relationship between the humans and the various types of others, and indeed the interactions of the more common types of others with the elders, was very satisfying. I enjoyed the characters of Grimshaw the sheriff, Julian the intuit bookstore owner, and Ilya the sanguinati lawyer as they tried to contain and solve the murders happening around town. There were lots of clues, red-herrings, and misdirects to keep the plot moving, though the characters were mostly reactionary, responding to crisis after crisis without every getting ahead of what was happening.

I was less interested in the chapters focused on the seeming main character, Vicki DeVine. Truthfully, I found her a bit boring. She seemed more a catalyst to tie the other characters together than a character in her own right. She suffers constant panic attacks, so all the other characters treat her like she's made of glass, and she's not very bright. She seems to function mostly on luck and good intentions.

At one point Meg, the main character from the original series, provides Vicki with a prophecy, but Vickie doesn't utilize the information, and the prophecy doesn't serve much of a purpose in the story, so it seemed like just a cameo callback to the main series and another excuse for Vickie to have a panic attack rather than providing actually useful information.

As always, I love the distinct way the Crows and Sanguinati were depicted, and Bishop is truly talented at writing antagonistic characters that are impossible not to hate (as intended). Overall, I enjoyed this visit to the Others' world.

View all my reviews