Book Review: Bitter Spirits

Bitter Spiritsby Jenn BennettBerkley Sensational, 2013 The enormous popularity of the Regency and quasi-Regency (give or take a George or two) period in the romance novel field tends to throw other historical periods into the shade, so three cheers for Jenn Bennett's new novel Bitter Spirits, the first in a new series titled "Roaring Twenties" and set in San Francisco in that badly under-romanced period. Specifically San Francisco's mysterious Chinatown, where vicious tong-gangs are the private armies of shadowy urban warlords, and where Aida Palmer has a stage show as a medium. Little do her adoring audiences suspect that her spirit-summoning abilities are real, and those abilities are vividly, atmospherically described by Bennett, who does more intelligent work in making her schemed-out system of magic and the supernatural than many a fantasy novelist bothers to do.Also vividly described, naturally, are the attractions of sexy bootlegger Winter Magnusson, who crosses paths with Aida when he finds himself under the disorienting effects of a malicious hex - mainly, um, two attractions:

The men grunted in unison as they half dragged, half shoved Winter toward the tub. Aida snatched a towel off an etagere to dry her arm, sneaking a look at Winter's backside as they passed. A majestic sight. When he tried to take a step on his own, his buttocks rippled with muscle, deepening the clefts on either side and indenting two succulent dimples on his lower back.

Once those succulent dimples have been saved from their hexing, the quest for the identity of Winter's supernatural attacker is launched, and that quest quickly embroils Aida, whose supernatural abilities bring her to the attention of the book's superbly hissable villain (that villain, who initially simply wants her out of the way and has her apartment set on fire, later changes his mind as a result - unprecedented in my romance reading - of praying on the subject), whose own supernatural abilities are just sufficiently different from hers to make him curious about her. His horrible zombie-creating powers are likewise very effectively evoked, as when he describes them to her:

"If I command her to seek a person, she will walk for miles until her legs fall apart - and when that happens, she'll crawl. Her hands will scrabble across dry desert, long after her head has fallen in a ditch. I bound her spirit to her bones, and she can do nothing but obey my commands."

This formidable villain has been pulling the strings of the book's plots behind the scenes, and Bennett clearly relishes laying out her plot-lines; this is a very charmingly infectious novel, a sterling advertisement for the rest of the series, one hopes. She creates a detailed historical world, intriguingly different from most of the historical romances on bookstores shelves (so intriguing, in fact, that we can forgive her the occasional malapropism, as when we're told, "Mrs. Beecham teetered past Aida to sling both her arms around one of Winter's, hanging on to it like the remaining mast on the Titanic"), and in Aida especially she creates a heroine worth following into future books.