Review: Corpselight

Corpselight by Angela Slatter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I gave 5 stars to Vigil, the first in this series, because I felt it took the "kickass supernatural PI" genre into a higher key with its focus on family and relationships (of widely varying types).

This book has many of the same strengths, but also at least one of the same weaknesses and a couple of (I think) new ones, so it didn't quite make it to 5 stars - though it still makes my 2020 Best Of shelf.

Finding myself short of good books, I decided to look for sequels to books I'd enjoyed in previous years, and was glad to find this one. There's plenty of action and plenty of heart, and it's delivered in sound prose - but with a few minor typos that I don't recall seeing in the first book. That's weakness number 1.

Weakness number 2 is, for me, the big one. It's the way in which the main character's male partner - who I characterised as a genderflipped damsel in distress in my review of the first book - is now a genderflip of the wife who has no role other than to be supportive to the hero. He doesn't pass a reverse Mako Mori test; he has no arc of his own, no agenda of his own, even. He's there to look after the baby and do emotional work on behalf of the protagonist so that she can go out and kick ass, and he embraces this fate with barely a complaint. He's a solution, never a problem (though, of course, he's also a vulnerability, at risk of refrigeration). I don't like this when the genders are the other way round, so I don't see why I should approve of it in this instance.

Noticing this completely supportive character got me noticing how all the rest of the supporting cast are also so very supporting, how it's all about the protag, to the degree that she's almost (not quite) a Spoiled Protagonist. (That's my term for someone who gets handed help she hasn't earned just because she's the protagonist. In this case, she's arguably earned it, but it does seem like she gets an awful lot of it.) I love an ensemble cast, but this is not one; it's a hero and her support team, and because it's all about her, she's the only character who ends up with much depth.

Weakness number 3, which often goes along with a spoiled protagonist, is that there are a couple of convenient coincidences; the person being investigated has two other, apparently completely random, connections to the main character, and while this helps drive the plot and raise the stakes, I am never a fan of putting coincidence where protagonist effort should be.

Once again, though, the thematic subtext of the book saves it and propels it above the run of the mill. In book 1, it was all about family: good families, bad families, close families, families at war within themselves, found families, dysfunctional families. Here, the focus zooms in a bit; it's on motherhood specifically, and again, it looks at motherhood through many different lenses, good mothers, bad mothers, mothers who neglect or abandon their kids or worse, mothers who try to make up for mistakes of the past...

There's just more depth of humanity in this series than in the average urban fantasy, and even if most of it is in the hands of the protagonist, it still lifts the book. Verity has a great line of snark and is, at one and the same time, a coarse, rude, abrasive person and also deeply compassionate and dedicated to doing the right thing. That chimes with my (limited) experience of Queenslanders, though it may dial both tendencies up a bit for cinematic purposes.

Like its heroine, this series is certainly not perfect, but well worth following, and I look forward to reading book 3.

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