I just finished reading Right to the Kill by Craig Schaefer, book five in his Harmony Black series of urban fantasy espionage novels. In this book, government paranormal agents Harmony Black and Jessie Temple head to Florida to find out what happened to a couple of fellow agents who went missing. Then, things go wrong.
I started reading Shaefer’s work with his Daniel Faust series, which is set in the same world. Harmony Black is a spinoff series based around a character who first appeared in the Faust books. Both series are quite good.
Shaefer’s urban fantasy novels follow the usual pulp novel trajectory of an author writing a standalone story and then slowly building a greater myth arc into later books as they realize that they’ve got something good going here. Eventually, the Faust books and the Black books crossed over in the Wisdom’s Grave trilogy, which I haven’t read and didn’t actually realize was a crossover series until halfway through Right to the Kill, when I finally went and did some Googling in order to figure out why the characters kept talking about events I didn’t remember happening. So I spent a good portion of this book wondering if I was misremembering stuff from the previous book in the series, Cold Spectrum. Turns out I wasn’t, I just hadn’t read Wisdom’s Grave yet.
Fortunately, Right to the Kill works even without that knowledge (though I wouldn’t suggest reading it without having read the rest of the series). If you like the sort of urban fantasy that I also like, by which I mean pulp action stories where colorful characters with guns quip at each other and get into shootouts with demons, then I highly recommend both Harmony Black and Daniel Faust. Faust is more occult crime stories and Black is more paranormal espionage, but both have that same grimdark the-world-is-full-of-monsters vibe that a lot of urban fantasy leans on. If you like that sort of thing, which I do, then they’re great. And Shaefer is immensely prolific, too, so there’s never much of a wait until the next adrenaline hit comes in.
As for Right to the Kill itself, I really enjoyed this one. Special Agents Harmony Black and Jessie Temple are chasing magic supervillains up and down the Eastern seaboard, dealing with nautical murderers and death cults and some Innsmouth references that I really enjoyed. None of it is really new, all of this has been done before, but it’s put together so well that I can’t say that I mind at all. I don’t care that it’s cliche, I will absolutely read any book about government agents fighting monsters in the dark, as long as it’s written well. And you can always depend on Shaefer to write some good pulp action.
Looking forward to the next one. Until then, though, I should probably go read Wisdom’s Grave.