I sense a motif in my reading

Seanan McGuire returned to her InCryptid series with Magic for Nothing. Which I have now finished, sitting in the backyard enjoying 70 degree weather.

Unlike the previous five volumes, this one doesn't center on Alex or Verity, instead we're following around their youngest sister, Antimony Price. You know, the one who build traps for fun.

We pick up not long after the conclusion of Chaos Choreography, with Verity killing a snake god on live TV then declaring war on the Covenant of St. George.

Which winds up causing issues for Antimony, who gets pulled out of Roller Derby practice to be given her marching orders. As the one in the bloodline who looks least like the rest of the family, she gets sent to England to be recruited to join the Covenant and find out what their plans are for the Price-Healey family.

Which she eventually does, giving us probably the clearest picture of another sect of monster hunters since Alex's trip down under. (Given the covenant has been kind of a Boogeyman since the outset, this has been kind of necessary, particularly given their only other antagonistic appearance back in Book 2.)

Antimony goes undercover as Timpani Brown, lately of the Black Family Carnival, who were taken out by Apraxis Wasps. She does eventually get into the Covenant, where we get a better picture of the Covenant and their European ideas on Monsters, regardless of intelligence, needing to die to protect humanity. And Antimony, and we as readers, get to see them as humans instead of cardboard bad guys.

At the end of her training, Antimony gets sent to infiltrate the The Spenser and Smith Family Carnival, currently in Madison, Wisconsin, to figure out whether or not the Carnival is somehow involved in the mysterious disappearances of some of the local boys.

Antimony ends up growing close to the half Monkeyboy Sam, grandson of the owner. All of which comes crashing down in the final few chapters as the Covenant comes in to Purge the Carnival.

It's really well written, and Antimony makes a good character, better than the occasional references thrown out in previous books. While a few of the twists were expected, the way they came around were not only mostly natural, but unexpected in the forms they took, which is an added bonus. That she manages to add in bits of surreal humor in really serious passages helps quite a bit as well. (Case in point, as the action approaches the climax, Antimony drops in on the Carnival's resident Wadjet [males are giant cobras, females are fairly human looking], only to observe one of the males on the bed watching NetFlix on a tablet. The mental pictures she provides of a giant cobra using a stylus between its coils is perfection.)

I'll admit, while I was amused by this series from the start, other than a plot trigger in book 2, I'm happy the series has come this far and look very much forward to book 7, which will evidently also center on Antimony.