Shaman and community support officer to the supernaturally inclined Sharon Li has her hands full enough running London’s first magical support group, Magicals Anonymous, when the Midnight Mayor unhelpfully disappears and leaves her in charge of figuring out why. The clues he leaves behind are challengingly cryptic, too: An umbrella with a missing point and a dose of mystical whammy that only a shaman like Sharon can sense, and a map marking the locations of dozens of recent disappearances connected only by what they leave behind — their shoes. Sharon has the assistance of both the Aldermen and her ragtag group of druids, necromancers, banshees, vampires, and gourmet trolls to call upon in solving the intertwined mysteries, but she’s slamming up against quite the deadline — not only is Matthew Swift running out of time to be rescued, but the disappeared belong to Old Man Bone, and if he doesn’t get what he’s owed, the plague pits of London will open and black death will once more roll through the streets.
I really want to like these books more than I do, because the Matthew Swift series that preceded them was awesome, and Griffin captures her love and knowledge of London on the page so beautifully. Unfortunately, I have a difficult time getting past the awfully flat characterisation. None of our protagonists have grown at all since the first Magicals Anonymous book, Stray Souls — if anything, they’ve doubled down on the annoyingness and the shallowness. Sharon continues to be a vapid, self-absorbed bundle of self-help cliches and management strategies that read like they were pruned from spambots on Twitter, and Rhys continues to have exactly one personality trait, that of ‘kicked puppy’. The other members of Magicals Anonymous barely exist as more than an excuse for punchlines, ones which were made plenty of times in the first book and weren’t that funny to begin with.
This time around, we can add unforgivably stupid to Sharon’s list of oh so endearing qualities, though. She’s a shaman, right, seer of the truth that lies beneath the everyday? Or so several secondary characters will keep on (and on and on) telling us. You would have thought, then, she might possess enough insight to notice things like a highly visible identical detail in every one of several crime scenes she and Rhys visit and photograph without having to have it belatedly pointed out to her by an exposition fairy banshee. Perhaps that it might also have occurred to her that if the Aldermen have the resources to produce military-grade weapons on demand, they might be useful people to ask to put a tail on the extremely suspiciously-acting person they already know is at least peripherally connected to one of their cases, or to trace the numbers on a dead woman’s cell phone. These tasks all seem to be beyond her, though.
The main story thread involving the disappearances and Old Man Bone is genuinely quite compelling, except for the fact that if it had been pursued by characters acting intelligently, it would have taken about half the time to solve. It was what kept me turning the pages quite avidly despite the level to which Sharon was getting on my nerves, though, and I imagine I’d have enjoyed it a lot if it had been pursued by Matthew or Penny or anyone who felt like a real, intellectually engaged person. The thing is that Matthew’s powers have reached the point where the story would need a lot more meat on the bones to actually keep him from bulldozing his way to the denouement so fast, which is why I initially looked forward to the change in protagonist in moving from the Swift novels to the Magicals Anonymous ones, but that was when I imagined that his successor would be as finely characterised as he had been. At this point, I’d love to abandon Sharon and crew entirely and go back to his story, although if Stray Souls was anything to judge by, Griffin has lost a feel for his voice and can’t really write him in-character anymore.
That makes it something of a saving grace, I guess, that in The Glass God he’s a driving force behind the story but not much of an actual presence in it. This was one of the aspects of the novel I did think was well-handled: Swift and the blue electric angels as a force that looms over the story and reminds us of its rapidly ticking clock. Because those blue electric angels remain as terrifying when unleashed as they are beautiful.
It sounds like I hated the book. I didn’t, as my rating will reflect. It’s more that I am profoundly disappointed in it because Kate Griffin was at the pinnacle of her field in books like The Midnight Mayor and The Neon Court, and I don’t really know how we got from that to this. I turned the pages fast enough, even chuckled a few times at the less desperate attempts at humour, and if this were a book by a new urban fantasy author, I wouldn’t be recommending it to anyone, but I’d be keeping an eye on their future releases because of the elegant prose, the beautiful take on London, and the seeds of promise in the story. But Griffin is not a debut author, and given the downward trajectory of the last few books, I’m hoping this is where she lays Magicals Anonymous to rest and moves on to something that brings back the spark she lost after The Neon Court.
