Just Finished Reading: Urban Shaman by C E Murphy (FP: 2005)

One her way back from her mother’s funeral in Ireland (long story) Joanne Walker is looking out of the window as her plane descends into Seattle when she sees a woman being hunted by someone with a pack of dogs. When the authorities refuse to believe her claim she jumps into a taxi and heads out to the dead-end part of town and finds the woman – thankfully still alive. Recovering from the ordeal in a local coffee shop she has quite a tale to tell, of ancient gods, the wild hunt and the end of the world. Before Joanne and the taxi driver can even start to think about laughing all hell literally breaks loose and, to cut a long story short, Joanne is fatally wounded with a very large sword wielded by a very annoyed deity – and that’s when things start to get strange. It seems that the Celtic god Cernunnos is looking for someone and if he doesn’t find her or a decent substitute in 3 days his bonds to the other world will be severed forever which is something really, really bad as the rest of the world is concerned. But it would seem that Joanne is the right person in the right place to stop it happening. It’s no accident that she is coping with the upheavals in her life as if she was made for this kind of thing – because she was. Now all she needs to do is figure out exactly how to use the sudden power coursing through her body without killing herself, those around here or the whole city by accident.    

I was kinda burnt out with Urban Fantasy but thought I’d try not to get back into it in a big way but to ease myself back into things. This was a borderline reasonable way to do so. Despite its very silly premise and even sillier plot it did manage to entertain enough without too many eye-rolling moments or sighs of exasperation. OK, there were a few but at the low end of acceptability for this sort of thing. OK, it was also largely by the numbers with the usual wise-cracking, highly attractive but strangely single, female thrown into the middle of things and finding that she’s the chosen one with weird ‘super-powers’ she’s only just found out about but that’s to be expected these days given the origin of much of this stuff (I’m looking at you Buffy Summers). There’s also the solid side-kick sounding board/straight man in the guise of a very open minded and bizarrely well-read taxi driver that nothing, and I do mean nothing, seems to faze in the least. One of the things I did find rather odd, and highly unbelievable to be honest (yes, I know the book was about Celtic gods trying to destroy the world but bear with me here) was the fact that, rather than hide her abilities and fight the bad guys in secret (as is normally the case) a lot of the action took place in plain sight and involved ‘normal’ people. Whether that is followed up in future novels I don’t know but it would be a rather difficult path to follow – if ultimately a very interesting one.

All in all this was, at base level, fluff. Rather entertaining fluff with some sparkling dialogue but still not exactly high literature. Far from the worst Urban Fantasy I’ve ever read it did keep me interested enough for a little over 400 pages which must say something. Reasonable.