So now I know about e-bank transfers. I don't trust technology, and there seems something scary about providing an email address and suddenly having money sent to a bank account whose number I have *not* disclosed. So when someone says last night at ten 'I'm sending it now, you'll see it inside 30 minutes' and I don't, not then and not this morning and not this afternoon either, what am I to think but that my money has vanished into the ether? (This is how the Midnight Mayor makes his salary, I'm sure-- the Angels grab the bank transfers as they fly through the phone wires in a stutter of bytes.)
What I should have thought, and what I would have thought had I not been paralyzed by technophobia, is 'If an email fails to appear, check your spam filter.' So all's well that ends well, but the whole process makes me wibbly. All that 'arcane knowledge of London' I was promised in 61 Nails, where is it? Why, here on p.200, finally, after hapless heroes called Rabbit and teasing part-Fae female shapeshifters and needs-an-editor redundancy and explanations that don't explain and non-sequitur dialogue and The Evil Dead Pureblood Fae, whose females are distinguished by their ability to produce a smelly black mold that eats wood (you can tell this was written by a guy) and males by their shining bodies that suck the life force out of people, and *how* is that different from sparkly vampires I ask me? But now we have quit claim ceremonies that give us the title and the underground Fleet and things might improve, even if Fleet isn't a dark-skinned black woman with muscular arms.
61 Nails has a first-person narrator, as indeed does McLeod's Cold Bloody Bores, which reinforces just how much the Peter Grant books work by virtue of being narrated by Peter Grant, that rarest of creatures, a likable central character. Even if he's a bit smart-alec and buoyantly self-confident, he has manners (because he has an African mother) and an engaging curiosity, and when he sulks or feels ill-used he does it with sardonic distance from himself. There need to be more people like him, in RL as much as in books.
(Oh thank you LJ, the drop-down tag menues and preview buttons are back.)
