Review: A Red-Rose Chain, by Seanan McGuire

[Russ Allbery]

A Red-Rose Chain
by Seanan McGuire

Series:    October Daye #9
Publisher: DAW
Copyright: 2015
ISBN:      1-101-60178-7
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     368

This is the ninth book in the October Daye series and continues to not
be a series you should start in the middle, given how much the story
depends on the texture of relationships that have been built over time.

It was inevitable that the events of Chimes at Midnight would have
further fallout, even though they didn't come up much in the previous
book. This is that fallout: a threatened war by a neighboring kingdom
against the Kingdom of the Mists, in which all of the previous books
have been set. Under the law of faerie they have three days to try to
come to terms before the war starts. The queen sends Toby as an
ambassador.

Toby is about as good of an ambassador as she was a private detective,
and knows it.

While the politics in this series are enjoyably entertaining and much
of what keeps me reading, I would never claim they're realistic
examples of real negotiations and political intrigue. Real life is more
complicated and a lot more boring than this. But I do like that Toby
realizes, with some help, that there are different types of
negotiations, and that sending a dangerous and violent wildcard under
the protection of diplomatic immunity may accomplish things unrelated
to traditional diplomacy, as long as she can hold her temper and her
manners just enough to not give the opposing court an obvious excuse to
remove that immunity. Behind that could have been layered some complex
trickery, something that shows that the rest of the court isn't reliant
on Toby and her growing power to solve all their problems. One of the
disappointments of this book is that, despite the characters talking
about it, McGuire doesn't do much with that idea.

Another disappointment is that McGuire is a little too dependent on a
standard plot structure in these books, and it rears its head again
here. Something bad happens, Toby gets involved, Toby makes everyone
uncomfortable and pokes in lots of corners and finds things out while
people try to kill her, something awful happens to her or her friends
or both, and Toby musters enough resources in one form or another to
resolve the situation. Some of this is three-act structure, but in a
long series some variation on that structure is needed, or it can start
feeling like old episodes of The A-Team. I thought there were some
missed opportunities here for one of the other characters, perhaps May,
to take a more central role. Hopefully in a later book.

That said, I continue to love McGuire's imaginative construction of
faerie and the way she overlays it on west coast politics and
geography. This is the first time in this series that Toby has traveled
outside the Bay Area (at least in the mortal world); as an Oregon
native, I'm glad that trip was to Portland. The scenes with Ceres were
the best part of the book, and not just because McGuire fittingly
incorporated roses into the faerie landscape of Portland. Ceres is a
marvelous character who strikes the balance between alliance and
neutrality that the best of McGuire's major powers do, but does so in a
way that's much different from the Luidaeg. I hope we see more of her.

I also liked the character banter throughout, as always. Toby and
Tybalt have settled into a new routine that I like almost as well as
their old routine, but the highlight of this book was May, with both
Jazz and Toby. That made it a bit more disappointing when May spent so
much of the tail end of the story off-camera.

I'm afraid this isn't one of the best books of the series. The plot
structure is a little too stock, the ending too abrupt, and the
villains, while sadly entirely believable, were over-the-top evil in a
way that I think makes the story less interesting. (The previous book,
The Winter Long, had a bit more interesting nuance.) A Red-Rose Chain
felt episodic in a way that the best books in this series aren't. But I
still enjoyed it, and I think other readers who have gotten this far in
the series will as well.

I do want to see more plots resolved via something other than Toby
being a hero, though.

Followed by Once Broken Faith.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-12-25

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>