My Top 5 Urban Fantasy Novels of 2011

Well, I can’t believe it’s been almost a week and a half since my last post. Time flies when you’re having fun… or grading and doing academic writing. (sigh) Anyway, I’ve been seeing lots of fun Top 5 lists, but some of them have left off my favorites. How dare they have opinions that differ from mine, lol! Here are my Top 5 Urban Fantasies of this year, not in any order.

Diana Rowland’s My Life as a White Trash Zombie

Okay, I might have lied when I said these were in no particular order, because this is definitely my favorite book on this list and not just because of its rockin’ cover by Daniel Dos Santos. Angel Crawford finds herself working in a morgue and drinking funny tasting “smoothies” after she’s discovered on the side of the road, naked and covered in blood. To her horror, she finds the scent of braaaaiiiiiins delectable and soon discovers that she’s been made a zombie. This is a great story of a young woman who’s had very few opportunities in her life suddenly making the most of a second chance at life. I can’t wait to read the second book of the series, coming out next summer. See my review.

Jenn Bennett Kindling the Moon

This debut novel was a fun surprise, and I do mean surprise! After a lifetime of reading who knows how many novels, it was a delight to find one that managed to sneak in an ending that I wasn’t expecting. Arcadia “Cady” Bell is 25 and working at the Tambuku Tiki Lounge when she spots her on-the-run parents on the nightly news. They were accused of heinous murders when she was a teen, and the family’s been living in hiding ever since. Cady finds herself working to clear her parents with lots of help from hottie Lon Butler. Their May-December romance (he’s 42) is sizzling, but I have a soft spot in my heart for Lon’s son, Jupe, who’s a real scene-stealer.

Seanan McGuire One Salt Sea (October Daye #5)

I could have chosen either of the October Daye books published this year (the 4^th in the series is Late Eclipses) for my top 5 list because both are excellent, but One Salt Sea introduces a new part of Faerie that we haven’t seen before. This series never disappoints, and Toby finds herself working with the usual suspects to prevent a war between the Undersea Duchy of Saltmist and the Queen of Mist. While you can read this book without having read any of the prior novels in the series, I highly recommend that you start from the beginning, as you’ll appreciate the interaction between the characters more. See my review.

Nancy Holzner Bloodstone (Deadtown #3)

I started the Deadtown series earlier this year, and while I enjoyed the first book in the series, I never got around to picking up the second book. I was really impressed with Bloodstone, though, so I’ll be going back to catch up on the second book. When a virus turned thousands of humans into zombies, the magical community came out of hiding to help contain the threat, only to be forced into segregation. Shifter Vicky is a demon exterminator in this alternate version of Boston, and in the third book of the series, she finds herself fighting a serial killer, dubbed the SouthEnd Reaper by the police. Vicky’s feisty Aunt Mab plays a key role in the action, and it’s a lot of fun to see Vicky’s teenage zombie sidekick, Tina, start to mature.

Ilona Andrews Magic Slays (Kate Daniels #5)

I’d be shocked if other bloggers did NOT include this book on their top 5 lists of Urban Fantasies this year. Set in an alternate version of my hometown, Atlanta, all of the Kate Daniels books pretty much kick ass, so you’re going to get a winner whether you start the series at the beginning or pick this one up on its own. In this book we finally get to see sword-wielding Kate and her lion-shifter mate Curran in connubial bliss, which makes for some funny one-liners. When Kate’s detective agency is asked to find a missing scientist, all sorts of magical mayhem ensues. Watching the independent heroine and bossy-pants alpha hero sort out how they’ll deal with their roles in this new relationship makes the book all that more fun.

Urban Fantasy Heroines Have Seriously Messed Up Lives

One of the reasons I love to read Urban Fantasy is the strong female heroines. These women kick serious ass, often facing overwhelming odds to insure their survival and that of their friends and families. And in Urban Fantasy, there’s not always a guaranteed happy ever after. Sometimes you have to settle for a happy for now, or a “things aren’t as screwed up as usual” for now.

But there are some Urban Fantasy heroines whose lives are waaaaaay messed up, even more so than the norm. Some of these heroines are barely functioning addicts, which begs the question, can an author make an addict a sympathetic heroine? Here are three of my favorite urban fantasies with heroines who have seriously screwed up lives. They may be popping pills, but you’ll be surprised at how likeable they are and how much you want everything to work out for them.

Stacia Kane’s Unholy Ghosts (Downside #1)

The heroine of Kane’s Downside series, Chess Putnam, is probably the most messed up of these three heroines. She’s a highly functioning addict living in a world where ghosts attack humans and only members of the magical Church of Truth can help you get rid of them. Chess is a ghost debunker for the Church, working to send ghosts back to the underworld and protect humans. Unfortunately, she owes a ton of money to her dealer, Bump, so when he wants her to get fix the haunted airfield so he can fly in shipments of drugs she has no choice but to agree. As a child, Chess was tossed from foster home to foster home, dealing with physical and sexual abuse, so it’s no surprise that as an adult she tries to numb the pain of her dreary life with drugs and sex. Chess doesn’t make great choices in her personal life, but she takes great pride in her job as a debunker. What makes this book impressive is that you’ll like Chess and want her to succeed. This is a great start to fascinating series, and the first three books in the series are on sale at Amazon in anticipation of the fourth book’s release.

Stacey Jay’s On the Delta This takes place in a Louisiana taken over by mutant fairies whose bites are deadly. There are no cute flying pixies here, and to deal with her reality Annabelle Lee pops pills at night to sleep and is a functioning alcoholic by day. Annabelle has the good fortune to be immune to the fairy venom, but when a vicious murder occurs in her town and her ex-lover Hitch shows up with the FBI to investigate it, Annabelle hits a new low. Like Chess, Annabelle’s had a tough life and is using alcohol to dull the pain, but she’s capable of so much more than even she believes. You’ll definitely want everything to turn up roses for her, and I’m hoping that in the next book in the series her POS ex-lover Hitch gets what’s coming to him. We can always hope.

Diana Rowland’s My Life as a White Trash Zombie As much as I like Chess and Annabelle, I LOVE Angel Crawford. Angel’s a high school dropout with a pill problem, and the novel begins when she wakes up in the hospital after being discovered on the side of the road, covered in blood and nothing else. She doesn’t remember what happened to her, but an anonymous benefactor sends her a note that tells her to report to work at the morgue. It turns out that Angel’s been made into a zombie, and being a morgue tech gives her ample access to her new food source: brains. Over the course of the book Angel takes pride in her newly learned skills and friends, and she starts to make smarter choices. Her life as a zombie is complicated, but it’s the second chance she needed. Diana Rowland always writes taut plots with interesting characters, and I love that her female characters are working-class and complex. And frankly, the gross descriptions of Angel’s work in the morgue are just icing on the cake for this reader.

Review of Diana Rowland's My Life as a White Trash Zombie

This book is seriously sick – and I LOVED it!!! I made a trip to Barnes and Noble yesterday and was totally psyched to find this book out a few days early, since it’s not supposed to come out until Tuesday.  I’m a huge fangirl of Diana Rowland’s Kara Gillian books, and My Life as a White Trash Zombie is a great start to a new series. This book rocked! I’ve never been a big fan of zombie fiction, but I love to read paranormal fiction set in the South, so this book seemed right up my alley, and it did not disappoint. The super cool cover by artist Daniel Dos Santos is just icing on the cake.

Angel Crawford is a self-described loser who finds herself in the emergency room after a drug overdose. When she’s released from the hospital, the nurses give her a sack of clothes and a small cooler, with an anonymous note that tells her to drink one bottle of what’s in the cooler every other day and informs her that she’s starting work as a van driver at the coroner’s office first thing in the morning. If she manages to keep the job, she’ll avoid jail time, which she’s eager to do since she’s currently on probation for possession of stolen property. It’s not until she’s at her new job the next day, assisting the pathologist in an autopsy, that she realizes that something is VERY wrong, because the smell of the cadaver’s brains make her stomach growl in hunger. Eventually she learns the truth – she’s a zombie and has to eat brains to survive. When headless corpses start showing up around town and the cops begin looking for a serial killer, Angel starts to wonder if she’s not the only zombie in town.

Diana Rowland’s experience as a cop and a morgue assistant give her a lot of material to draw on for her novels, and the yuck factor with the autopsies is high, which made this pretty appealing to my admittedly sophomoric sense of humor. “Ewww, gross!” was mentioned quite a few times while I was reading, that’s for sure. I love how Ms. Rowland describes the more tedious aspects of crime scene investigation and Angel’s surprise at how unlike crime scene investigation in real life is compared to shows on TV. She manages to make some seriously uncool realities interesting, and that’s because of her characters.

On the face of it, Angel Crawford should be an unappealing heroine. She’s a high school dropout, self-described white trash, a convicted felon, and a habitual drug user. But from the start she’s a character with whom you’ll empathize. The more we learn about her past, the more we realize that she’s had a rough time of it, and her growing pride in her new skills at her job have us rooting for her. She’s only 21, and it turns out that being made into a zombie is probably the best thing that’s ever happened to her. You get the sense that she hasn’t had many second chances up to this point, and you want to cheer for her as she starts to make some really mature decisions and gets her life turned around.

There are two important plot lines in the novel that’ll keep you turning the pages. The first has to do with Angel’s life as a zombie. We learn along with her all that entails while the secondary mystery about a serial killer who decapitates his victims unfolds. The growing number of murders has Angel worried since it could decrease her access to a ready food supply, but she also wonders if there’s a rogue zombie in town attacking people. Ms. Rowland seamlessly ties the two mysteries together and the ending resolves both in a way that I did not see coming.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough. The writing was tight without being sparse, the dialogue was funny and snarky, and the heroine was just the right mixture of vulnerability and toughness. The only downside to this book? Having to wait for the next in the series!