The books are good enough to keep me reading, while irritating enough to make me resent doing so. Irritation is down to those supposedly YA tropes, 'All the meen gurls hate Toby for no reason at all!' aka Severus Snape Syndrome, and 'All the kewl dudes love Toby for no reason at all!' aka Mary Sue. (Granted that at least one of the meen gurls is a meen boy, but he comes round in short order and is soon crying on her shoulder, thus segueing into trope#2.) Note that three-quarters of the meen gurls who hate Toby enough to kill her do so because someone else tried to kill her, and that makes the collateral damage all her fault. The people who set up the kills? Mh, they don't come into it because the narrative necessity is We Hate Toby. And frankly, I'm not sure what that's doing in Urban Fantasy that's presumably aimed at something older than middle school. Maybe I have the target audience wrong there as well.
Whatever, I wish McGuire would deepen the characterisation or narrative or both just a tad. I want to know-- not 'what happens', but as ever, 'what happened.' Maybe I should just consult wikipedia for spoilers.
