Thicker Than Water

Thicker Than Water is the fourth novel in the Felix Castor series, which I've said before is the best of its little sub-genre of noir urban fantasy.  Actually, that strikes me as damning with faint praise, given the competition, so I should probably say that it's one of the strongest fantasy series going, as well as one of the strongest noir series going.


Carey has a mordant sense of style:

[I]t’s got a bit of class, as hospitals go. Tell me it wouldn’t lift your spirits to be wheeled out of an ambulance past that terrific eighteenth-century façade. ‘Bloody hell,’ you’d think, ‘I’m going up in the world.’

As well as arresting images like "The next day dragged on like a wounded snake across a barbed wire entanglement."

The preceding is all common to every book in the series, but there isn't much to say specific to this one, except that Carey finally fires the Chekov's gun he's been showing since book 1.  I'm very much looking forward to the fifth novel.