All of Seanan's books are fun, and I and my staff at The Portal Bookshop regularly get someone new hooked on the series

Received as part of the 2019 Hugo packet for Best Series.

Fun urban fantasy originally read in paperback.

"A Local Habitation" is the second in the famous October Daye series by Seanan McGuire. In this novel, we join the protagonist Toby aka October Daye as she looks out for January, the niece of her liege, while taking on a new assistant. The story takes a very quick twist into an investigation to discover who is killing the employees of faerie computer company, run by January, without becoming becoming the next victim. The setting and characters are very engaging and like most McGuire books, this one is very hard to put down. It was quite enjoyable, so please forgive me for keeping this review short as I just can't wait any longer to start reading book #3, An Artificial Night.

I read this for voting on the Hugo Awards in 2019. I like Ms. McGuire's work and this story was no exception.

Thank you so much for making this book available for Hugo voters. I will always vote for Seanan as she’s my favourite author.

I am planning a Seanan book binge in the new year. After I have read this book I will submit my review to NetGalley, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Angus & Robertson, and Booktopia.

This book was part of the 2019 Hugo Voting Packet, and I did not have enough time to write reviews of all the books in the packet. Thank you to the publisher for providing the book.

Read as part of the Hugo package, thanks very much. I had previously read this book and my review is on Goodreads.

This urban fantasy can get a little dark, but it holds true to the notion that Faerie are still roaming in and out of our world and the Summerlands, causing occasional havoc.

October or Toby Daye is a half-faerie changeling who has a gift of tasting people's blood and recapping their memories. She also works as a PI in San Francisco. She's sent by her liege lord to see why his daughter isn't returning calls in her new Faerie fort, as we Irish call their habitations or knowes. This fort turns out to be located in a high-tech firm with typically winding and bewildering corridors which shift and a cafeteria instead of a feasting hall. There are several characters of the immortal variety who one by one end up puzzlingly dead and Toby has to deduce who is picking them off and why.

Toby is something of a drama queen. She says she never thinks about the awful part of her life which saw her as a bespelled fish in a pond for over a decade. This after she's mentioned it three times in the first two chapters. The device of the fish is used to explain her unfamiliarity with all aspects of techie gadgets and the net. She thinks about it again a few more times during the story. Toby also keeps impressing on us that she's in the presence of various types of Faerie beings which could kill her or cause chaos in the blink of an eye, and may well just do that... only none of them ever does anything in this line, so that gets tiring.

The ongoing and speed-gathering murder mystery investigation occupies most of the book. If you don't like blood and dead bodies, look away now. For most of the book.

I may be reading too many crime stories, but it seemed to me that a communication issue, an identity issue and at least half the murder issue were plain as the pointy ears on Toby's head, so I don't know why any reasonably competent PI would not have come to the same immediate conclusions as I did.

I enjoyed a car-crushing scene and my favourite character was Quentin, a suitably laid-back young page fostered into Toby's knowe, who is sent to assist her. Maybe the liege lord didn't like him. The author has presented a modern adaptation of the old legends and as long as such books are written, the legends will never die. That really is what we want from our urban fantasy. Just as well, because it's not too bright as a detective story.

A Local Habitation was like sitting down to watch a movie or TV show you thought was going to be a fun dramady with a bit of a mystery and then it turns into a full-on horror show with dead bodies and blood everywhere.

Funnily enough, it made me fall even deeper in love with McGuire's writing. She made the horror romp fun, even though it also had my heart beating a million miles a minute. The minute I finished this book, I picked up the third, not realizing it was going to be the scariest one so far... and that I was going to LOVE IT.

This is the book that made me go all in on the Toby Daye series. Not only is the book's mystery great, we meet/get better acquainted with a few important recurring characters (Quentin!), putting a few more curves in Toby's path.

(Best Series read)

October Daye series given by the author (/publishers/organizers) with the voters' packet for Hugo Nomination of Best Series in 2019. Reviews will be coming later, and likely posted first to GoodReads/Amazon/B & N as books are already released.

The life of October Daye is never going to be boring, let us put it that way. From a run in with a mix of iron poisoning, transformation, blood loss and near death experiences in trying to solve a murder six months ago, Daye's experiences are no less chaotic here. What starts as a seemingly simple assignment to get in contact with her liege's niece, somehow spirals into a locked house murder mystery... fae style... and the bodies are mounting up by the day.

Whilst I certainly enjoyed it, I can't say it was quite as good as the first instalment. There were several reasons for this and the key one is that lots of it reads like one of those old school horror movies where the characters repeatedly make the most stupid mistakes known to mankind. These are mistakes that kids stopped making in the 90's... if not the 80's. And then those mistakes are repeated time and time again. It's no surprise then that the body count just keeps rising. The problem here though is I never really got attached to most of the characters here to actually care. Unlike the first novel which strongly developed a key set of characters, this sort of dumps you in the middle and leaves you to play eeny meeny mo about who's going to pop it next.

There are however some superb moments in this book though and McGuire's characteristic dry wit shines through. I still really enjoyed the portrayals and growth of some of our key characters, although Toby could be really damn thick. I really enjoyed the use of the King of Cats and the relatively subtle romantic threads that twine through without overpowering the main story. Whilst some aspects of the mystery could have done with fleshing out - Alex for instance - it is well paced and tense as McGuire manages to keep things twisting and turning throughout. The world building continues to be excellent, with aspects of fae lore being relatively new to me.

As far as dark urban fantasy goes, this isn't the best I have read, but it is still a solid novel and I am interested in where this series is going next. I love the dry wit and wry, sarcastic humour that is still prevalent; it still feels reminiscent of the Dresden and the Chronicles of St Mary series' in style, but easily unique enough to stand on it's own two feet as a truly interesting series.

I downloaded this as part of my Hugo Voter packet. Fantastic! My top nominee for Best Series. Seanan McGuire is a treasure.

had picked this up months ago and got sidetracked and only just restarted the book and then finished it in one night. The second book in a new series and I have to say the Fae are shown as they seem to be represented in the fairy tales. Toby is a knight for one of the "good" guy and is asked to investigate the disappearance of of his niece, a Countess of her own area and he can't do it due to politics. Most of the book is set underhill at a tech startup the Countess started. It is a nice "locked room" murder mystery within a urban fantasy setting. I'm very interested to see what the next book in the series will bring.

On my re-read I have to say that I am still disappointed in this book. I hate to say it but this may be my least favorite books of the series. I should love it, it has a frickin server tree Dryad for fuck's sake...but I don't. And I feel bad about that, but it just. doesn't. work for me.

I liked this better than the first book in the series. It was nice to get past some of the initial worldbuilding and into the events. The overall plot is essentially a locked room mystery. It held up fairly well as a mystery (although some of the contrivances to move the plot along felt a bit forced), and it was nice to get deeper into some of the intricacies of the Fae world. Most of the new characters were engaging, although I could have done without Alex and that story line.

October Daye used to be a private eye who worked for the fae in San Francisco, because being a changeling made that a natural choice – right until she got forced to spend nineteen years as a fish after an investigation went wrong. Once the curse was broken, she tried to go back to a normal life, only to get dragged back into murders and mysteries. Rosemary and Rue is a murder mystery with curses; A Local Habitation is supposed to be Toby as a political envoy, and then; and An Artificial Night is a missing persons case with shades of Tam Lin.

I think my problem with this series is that I was sold on it as a mystery series with fae, and it's really really not. It's an extended character study with a vague mystery to hang the character stuff on, which is fine when that's what I'm expecting (see also: Sunshine is great, fight me), but when I'm expecting a mystery it makes me really salty. Especially because the foreshadowing is a bit too obvious for me and tends to reveal the plot about a third of the book before Toby realises what the plot is – it's been suggested that this might be because I have a lot of genre savvy for mysteries, and that other people didn't have this problem so absolutely judge that for yourselves! It makes Toby look absolutely oblivious though, which is frustrating for me as a reader.

As a character study though, they're not bad! Toby is a mess who flings herself into all of her problems like they're the last thing she's ever going to do (I think because in most of these they literally are), and her problem solving skills are inventive. I love her friendship group as well, though she doesn't treat them well – which I thought she'd learned by the end of the first book but more fool me – but I enjoy reading about them and how much she is loved, and how she absolutely cannot process it. The voice the story is written in is really great, especially for how Toby explains the weird politics and magic of the fae. I love how her magic works, because the reliance on nursery rhymes to help her shape it really makes me happy. And the scenes that are meant to be horrifying are really well written – there is a scene with the night haunts in A Local Habitation that is delightfully creepy! I just... Hit a point in book four where I couldn't deal with how unrelentingly terrible everything is for Toby and the people around her anymore?

I feel like I should love these a lot more than I do, especially because I think everyone in my online social group adores them. It might just be a combination of trying to read a lot of them in quick succession before the Hugos, which meant that I burnt out on them, and that my expectations of what they were were mismanaged. If I'd come to it as an urban fantasy series where sometimes there are mysteries and sometimes there is going to other planes to fight a creature from nightmares, maybe I would have been okay and I would love it as much as everyone else does! Especially because, as it's been pointed out, I really like Human Disaster heroes, so this might be internalised misogyny showing up to steal my wallet. As it is, I am taking a break from the series until I feel brave enough to try again.

[This review is based off the omnibus provided by the publisher in the Hugo packet.]