As I again went digging through the pile of used books I've managed to collect this year, I came across Game of Cages by Harry Connolly, book 2 in his Twenty Palaces series. Mind you, I never read book 1, but hey....
I feel like I missed something in the set up. We start with the narrator, Ray Lilly, working in a grocery store, wondering if vaguely defined events in the last book were a dream. Then Catherine walks in, and we're headed out of Seattle to a small town in Northern Oregon, wherein an auction is taking place. Not just any auction, one where the big prize is something referred to as a Predator, a being from outside normal reality.
Catherine and Ray both nominally belong to some organization known as the 20 Palaces. They kill predators and those who summon them. Ray is something called a Wooden Man for Annalise, who is a Peer in the organization. Catherine is an investigator. (Still not sure oin all the rankings, but near as I can tell, the Peers actually use the sigils that create magic. Catherine has no magic of her own. Ray has protective sigils tattooed on him by Annalise. He also has a ghost know, which is for him, a slip of paper that can cut through anything. It also cuts away aggression when it hits humans or animals. Usually.
So, anyway, in the pecking order, Ray is somewhere under janitor. However, he's street smart.
They arrive after the auction has already ended. However, the winner is dead and the Predator has escaped.
A character who's pretty much Lo Pan from Big Trouble in Little China summons a predator that's a big ball of lightning. And everyone winds up trapped in small town Oregon a few days before Christmas chasing a Sapphire Dog. (Its method of feeding is to enchant humans to want to possess it, then fight over it. Kind of like Needful Things.)
We find out no one can leave town or sound the alarm as the bodies keep piling up. What passes for the local constabulary calls the staties for backup, and instead wishes them a Merry Christmas.
A peer does show up to take care of the issue, but he dies.
Annalise shows up, and she's glorious.
In the end, I begin to understand that we, the readers are looking through Ray's eyes and his complete lack of information on what the Twenty Palaces are. We get a brief glimpse at how magic in this setting works. We find out about other organizations unaffiliated or opposed to the Twenty Palaces.
It was interesting, and I enjoyed reading it. But I think I need to find book one to get a deeper understanding of what's going on here.
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