Meet the baddest belles of London city.
They were known as the fatales, once. Investigators and spies; killers and thieves; con artists and vigilantes — they fought fire with fire, did what had to be done, to make things right. Until the mission that broke them. Many decades later, the fatales have scattered to the winds.
Fionn’s the queen of London haute couture. Thetai’s the star of the power metal scene. And Daix? Could be anything. Anywhere. It’ll take a lot to bring them back together.
When a model goes missing from a catwalk show, Fionn’s frantic. The girl was a friend — and a fellow selkie. And she won’t be the last to vanish.
To catch the monster responsible, Fionn needs backup. It’s time for the fatales to reunite, but can they get it together after eighty years apart?
And will it be enough to face down an old enemy straight out of their murky, half-forgotten past?
One of my favourite things about Urban Fantasy is all the different re-imaginings of a particular city you can get by reading different books. But it has to be said that I’ve never quite seen London like this.
Hell and High Water showcases a London where selkies and fae are woven tightly into the fabric of the city. It hits a few of the usual urban fantasy beats — dead body, investigative point-of-view characters, a past that needs explored — but it does so in a way that makes it feel like its own thing. The world has a tremendous personality to it, and it definitely feels lived in. You can see hints of other stories lurking just off-page. It also nails that intersection of modern & magical that I feel like too many books miss the mark on.
What I loved, too, is that the main characters here have occupations which I feel like I very rarely see in this subgenre. Yeah, sure, they’re all ex-investigators who fought in a war or some such. But Fionn is a fashion designer! Thetai is a power metal singer! And given that they are, respectively, a selkie and a siren, that somehow makes complete sense!
The banter between the fatales is a lot of fun, though I did find occasionally that there was a level of distance to the narration and the dialogue. Part of that is down to the formality of the narrative voice (particularly in Fionn’s chapters), but I also found that a lot of the time I was intrigued by the characters in theory but not often in practice. I loved that the characters were (and acted) older and more mature, but while I could appreciate them on an intellectual level, they never quite broke through that glass ceiling into unadulterated enjoyment.
Now, this is something that a few of my co-judges disagree with me on! We had five readers read this book, and not everyone felt the same way, so your mileage may vary as to the characters! But for me, what kept me reading was the murder mystery and the world itself. Luckily for me, this isn’t one of those books where world & plot & character feel like separately crafted entities. Here, the plot unfolds in such a way that’ll teach you a little bit more about the setting, or a little bit more about a given character’s history.
It’s a book that’s put together really quite well, but one mark against it is that it really is quite… predictable, in a sense. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of crazy action and deduction scenes in the middle third, but by the end we found that we’d ended up pretty much exactly where we thought we’d be.
A lot of the above is just my own opinion. But to try and consolidate the opinions of five readers into one sentence (not an easy task!), I would say that Hell and High Water was a book that we felt had some great flashes of originality, but never really rose above “solid” in our estimations. Despite not being the preferred genre of a few of our readers, most of us enjoyed it from start to finish. One reader did note, however, that while Hell and High Water features a lot of hot people looking hotly at each other, there wasn’t enough banging. (So, uh, take from that what you will?)
But to get back to my point… The Fantasy Inn had decided this year that our four top-scoring books would be our “semi-finalists”. Unfortunately for Hell and High Water, it was our fifth highest-scoring book. This is a cut, but it’s one that comes with a hearty recommendation for anyone who feels intrigued by the concept!
Verdict: Cut
