November 24, 2014
Older’s debut novel, which launches the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series, pits half-dead Carlos Delacruz, an agent for the New York Council for the Dead, against an ancient sorcerer. Carlos (familiar from stories in Older’s collection, Salsa Nocturna) is an inbetweener, “alive and dead at the same time,” with no memory of his past. He and other COD agents work to protect the mortal world and the land of the dead from each other. The task of removing some annoying imps gets complicated fast when Carlos learns that they herald the arrival of Sarco, a powerful spirit bent on destroying the barriers between the living and the Underworld. Carlos is a winning protagonist, with a murky past, troubled present, and smart, smart-ass narrative voice. Older’s magical New York City is fresh and richly envisioned, a gritty and genuine urban setting rife with strange forces and thoroughly enlivened by the fixers, dealers, and supernatural creatures who inhabit it. Fans of urban fantasy will greatly enjoy this entirely lively novel. Agent: Eddie Schneider, Jabberwocky Literary Agency.
December 1, 2014
Readers have probably read about and watched plenty of zombies mindlessly devouring the living, but probably no one has found a zombie solving supernatural mysteries in New York City. In Older's new book, Carlos Delacruz lives on the border between life and death, and he works for the deliberately enigmatic Council of the Dead, tracking down trouble-making supernatural anomalies like himself. But all stylistic pretensions to refined fantastical mystery are happily discarded here, with Older willing to invent such words as indedamnterminate, grumbled between Carlos' teeth alongside a lit Malaguea. The hard-boiled noir is filled with delightfully witty and profane sarcasm, even when the classic style goes through a bit of generational reappropriation in describing twenty-first century New York culture. Carlos' humorously biting monologue does its job best when turned toward blunt yet cutting observations of New York immigrant culture and its interactions with a not-always-welcoming local establishment. For those interested in the deeper meaning beneath the snark, the often mentioned balance of power and misunderstanding between the forces of life and death can't evade its own metaphorical resonance. But for everyone, this is a fun, smart bit of paranormal noir, with more to come as the series continues.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)