Occultober Day 2: Princess of Wands by John Ringo

Occultober Day 2: Princess of Wands by John Ringo

For the second day of Occultober, I have chosen a book that is firmly in the urban fantasy genre, with an unusual twist. Rather than have paranormal powers, the heroine has only a genuine faith in the lord to protect her—that and a bunch of kicking martial arts and weapons skills.

 

Princess of Wands is a modern urban fantasy in which a soccer mom, Barb Everette, devout Episcopalian woman, finds herself confronting one of the elder gods from the Cthulhu mythos and after that gets pulled into an organization that helps the government handle Special Circumstances. The book is structured in three major (and one minor) parts and it moves very quickly in three of the four, keeping up a level of excitement while Ringo builds a fascinating world of secret investigations into things pretty much everyone believes the general public of the world is better off not knowing anything about.

 

Barb is a very interesting and unusual central character. She’s a military brat with extensive martial arts and weapons training, but she’s also a soccer mom with all that that implies. One day she gets fed up with her mundane existence and over her husband’s protests decides to take a weekend off for herself. She gets off her route and ends up broken down in a small town in the bayou which just happens to be the site from which a serial killer has been operating as he attempts to cause the manifestation of one of the elder gods. This is not a coincidence but, we assume, the result of the subtle influence of God getting Barb to the one place the world most needs her to be. The resulting action is well developed.

 

The second section of the book is much lower key, but just as interesting. Barb is brought into the U.S. organization that deals with Special Circumstances and learns a lot about people that are very different from her. They are a colorful group that don’t all get along with each other, but they are the best line of defense that America has for dealing with supernatural threats, of which there are many.

 

The third part of the book is the longest and the slowest. Barb is brought in on the investigation of a serial murderer with special circumstances. Her area of investigation is a science fiction convention, and Ringo has way too much fun going into the details of who attends conventions and what happens there. The excuse to do this is to identify suspects who might be the killer, but I’ve read the book four times and I still can’t keep track of the wide host of possible suspects. I would have liked this section to be cut in half. It’s good once all hell (literally) breaks loose, but pretty slow before that.

 

Finally, there’s a very nice extended epilogue in which Barb has to deal with a small but real problem at home.

 

As you can tell from the above, I love this novel. If you like supernatural investigations and combat, this is a good book for you to try out.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...

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