Review: The Bone Riders

The Bone Riders by Cady Fletcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A lot of urban fantasy/supernatural suspense books are written very much to a formula, which doesn't interest me. The blurb for this one suggested that it broke out of the formula, so I picked it up (from Netgalley, pre-release), and I'm glad I did. It's a solid, enjoyable piece with some original ideas.

The Bone Riders are magic users who have a specific application of their magic. They create (from the bones of dead horses) magical horses which are real and alive and behave like normal horses most of the time, but have some extra abilities when paired with their riders. For example, they can move much faster than ordinary horses when necessary, which simplifies the logistics of getting around the small city which is the setting for the story. The Bone Riders also help separate the leftover energy from things that have died if it hangs around; they have a sense of wrongness that enables them to detect it. All of this is cool, and it's not just "they're grim reapers" or "they're necromancers".

The viewpoint character, Drew (short for Andrea), came into her powers relatively recently, when she died in a car accident and then pulled herself back into her body. Her boyfriend, feeling responsible for the accident, broke up with her, but is still obsessively trying to be in her life, to a slightly creepy degree. She holds firm about them being exes, though she does rescue him at one point; she doesn't hate him, just knows they're better off not being together. He and a new guy she meets who might possibly be a new love interest down the track have names that sound similar (they're Cole and Case), which I found confusing at least once.

There's an apocalypse I wasn't expecting relatively early in the book, when the magic that has been seeping through into the city through a "rift" erupts into it and causes widespread damage, magical phenomena, and the empowerment of a number of citizens. There was both less problem with food supplies and a longer delay for aid to arrive than I suspect would be the case with a real disaster (even one that had such widespread effects), but that's largely in the background, as the Bone Riders battle the increased number of not-completely-dead humans and animals to release them, and deal with the new reality.

Right before the apocalypse, there's a set-piece that the author clearly put a lot of thought into, where Drew's terrible boss fires her for no good reason and she gives him her views on the toxic nature of employment relations in the USA.

In terms of copy editing, there are just a few typos and a number of surprisingly basic homonym errors (which I'll mention to the publisher, so they may well be fixed by publication). It reads smoothly apart from those, and as it looks like being a series, I look forward to spending more time with the Bone Riders.

Calling it now, though: Fiona is not human, but some sort of minor god-level being.

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