Coming back around

 Finished my reread of Mercedes Lackey and Rosemary Edgehill's Mad Maudlin, in which Bedlam's Bard, Eric Banyon finds out about his younger brother. 

Of the series, this is probably the one I remember the best, mainly because one of the plot threads overlapped with some digging I was doing when I read it. 

So, as we open, Eric has been seeing a psychologist who treats folks with magical ability, and dealing with trauma related to having parents who thought of him as a commodity more than a child. As such, he resolves to go see his parents in Boston. Which has the side effect of him learning of his younger brother Magnus, who evidently also has a degree of Bardic Gift. Magnus ran away from home for much the same reason Eric left Julliard at 18 to get the heck away. 

Magnus, in the meantime, is living on the streets of NYC with two close friends: Ace, aka Heavenly Grace, who is on the run from her father who was using her Talent to get more cash; and Jaycie, who's on the run from something else entirely.

Hosea, the banjo Bard/Guardian has his hands full with the Secret Stories going around the children in the homeless shelter he volunteers in (Bloody Mary, who lead the demons to heaven and took over) and his romantic interest, who's managed to get sucked into a cult based around Master Fafnir, who wants to supplant the Guardians with himself. 

As the book progresses, all the plots converge, as Ace's father's helper (an unseeleigh Magus Major) manages to target Eric with a spell, Fafnir manages to summon up Bloody Mary, and Jaycie and Bloody Mary's true identities are revealed

A few things struck me both last time and this time. The Bloody Mary thing being the first. There was a whole thing very similar to this that I found out about after reading involving children in Miami, if I recall correctly. One can't ignore the power of folklore among the youth. The other was the whol False Guardians plot with Master Fafnir, which seems to be echoing back on real life crap that happened long before I read any of her work. (There was a whole thing that you can google and decide for yourself on involving people making a myth cycle out of her Diana Tregard Investigations. Search for The Straw that Broke the Camel's Back.)

By far, this is probably the best of the series that these two collaborated on.

Slitter and Slither

 So, Morgan Brice's BadLands series continues with No Surrender, as we rejoin Vic and Simon in Myrtle Beach, dealing with a cocktail of wedding planning, the trial of the killer from books 1, the discovery of a serial killer on the Grand Strand from the 1980's, and the Slitter's fan boy sending cursed objects to people involved in the trial...

Which somehow all pulls together very nicely. 

Brice's M/M paranormal romance books have a really good tendency to be able to juggle multiple plots and weave them together fairly well, which is on full display here. I'm hoping that in a few volumes, when Vic and Simon do actually get around to getting married, all of the invited characters (from both the Morgan Brice series and the Gail Martin series manage to fit in the volume.

Flute and Banjo Duets

 Running behind on updates again due to personal issues.

Spirits White as Lightning continues Eric the Bard's story in NYC, as his relationship with Ria expands, Kory and Beth try to find a way to conceive a baby of their own (Maeve is technically Eric's daughter), and Aerune tries to get his hands on the drug that awakens latent powers. In the process, we meet the Appalachian Bard, Josiah, who plays banjo and becomes both Guardian and pupil to Eric. 

While this continues and finishes off the story from Beyond World's End, it leaves the door open for the next two books, as the Healer Kayla winds up living in Guardian House by the end as well. 

Really, it's a fun read, even as we have to adjust to some rather big adjustments in the makeup of the characters, although we also get to see Tannim and Chinthliss again, as the Dragon will give access to his library if Kory and Beth can build a computer that will work underhill. When I originally read this, I thought the plot was padding out the story, now I see where it's building a story that will expand in the next volume, as the Green Government people show up at one point. 

It's a fun and soapy read.

Threefer

 I'm a lot behind on catching up on these, so I'm reviewing an omnibus and a single volume as one big review. 

We'll start with Bedlam's Bard by Mercedes Lackey and Ellen Guon, which is an Omnibus of Knight of Ghosts and Shadows and Summoned to Tourney. We meet Renaissance Fair actor and flutist, Eric, who is having a loud breakup with his girlfriend at the outset. In his depression and drunkenness, Eric composes a song on his flute that winds up waking up Korendil, an elf trapped in The Dreaming by the exiled elf Perenor. 

Eric, Kory, and Eric's friend Beth wind up working together to stop Perenor from destroying the Nexus that is in Los Angeles by moving it by the Observatory, which manages to annoy both Perenor AND his daughter Ria. 

The second part picks up with Eric, Kory, and Beth living in San Francisco as a Throuple. In this one, a shadowy government agency is kidnapping psychics and using them for nebulous purposes. Eric breaks a few of the kidnapped psychics out using Nightflyers, which in turn lets the Nightflyers try to set off THE BIG ONE using equipment designed to prevent earthquakes. 

Then we come into Beyond World's End, in which Eric has become a full Bard, moves to New York, and restarts like at Julliard. Beth, being pregnant and more in a couple with Kory than Eric, stays in Underhill. There's a certain amount of humor in here, since Eric now lives in Diane Tregarde's apartment complex, and has a talking gargoyle dropping by for conversation. 

In this, Eric gets dragged into a mystery that also involves the Guardians, in which an Unseeleigh Lord is trying to find a Bard, but runs afoul of a shadowy group trying to awaken people's psychic gifts with drugs. 

While I still find myself loving the series, I found the transition to Eric going from nominally bisexual to hopelessly straight a bit jarring. In the transition, Eric's fluidity gets erased for the most part. Plus the redemption arc of Ria Llewellen is a bit rushed, since she was a secondary antagonist in the first book, now suddenly trying to make amends with Eric. 

I mean, it remains good reading, even as we again get dragged into the streets with the characters, a theme that tends to happen in any of Mercedes Lackey's Urban Fantasy series.