The second in the Toby Daye series, A Local Habitation sees her back in the fold, in service once more to Sylvester as one of his Knights and the person he calls in when he needs things handled. Which is what he does when his niece, fairly new ruler of a young fae territory, stops returning his calls. Pitching up at Tamed Lightning (said niece’s territory) with a young apprentice in tow, Toby finds its inhabitants apparently experimenting with all sorts of computing technology whilst their numbers are slowly picked off, one by one.
For someone who apparently spent time in the human world as a private detective as well as having quite the reputation in faery for getting shit done, Toby is a pretty useless detective. Preferring to blunder around snogging prime suspects and being spectacularly slow on the uptake in the face of huge red flags, getting shit done must mean something else in faery (by the time she’s finished, she’s also lost all but two and a half of Tamed Lightning’s employees). Quite how she is held in such high esteem by her peers is beyond me at this point.
That said, A Local Habitation is very readable with some great ideas floating around (the dryad transported from a tree into a server was one of my favourites) and I’m enjoying learning more about Toby’s world, its inhabitants and its rules. I’ll definitely be reading more, but I do hope that Toby starts showing just a little bit of competence that doesn’t rely on simply licking blood and hoping to pick up some useful memories, or she’ll go down as one of the more useless heroines I’ve read about.