The milieu Kevin Hearne introduced in The Iron Druid Saga continues to expand with Paper & Blood, the second installment of Ink & Sigil series featuring Sigil agent Al MacBharrais. Paper & Blood is a tale of kidnapping, deals gone awry, overconfident hobgoblins, monstrosities out of myth, and office receptionist who are more than they appear, and a guest appearance from that aforementioned Iron Druid.
There’s only one Al MacBharrais: Though other Scotsmen may have dramatic mustaches and a taste for fancy cocktails, Al also has a unique talent. He’s a master of ink and sigil magic. In his gifted hands, paper and pen can work wondrous spells.
But Al isn’t quite alone: He is part of a global network of sigil agents who use their powers to protect the world from mischievous gods and strange monsters. So when a fellow agent disappears under sinister circumstances in Australia, Al leaves behind the cozy pubs and cafes of Glasgow and travels to the Dandenong Ranges in Victoria to solve the mystery.
The trail to his colleague begins to pile up with bodies at alarming speed, so Al is grateful his friends have come to help—especially Nadia, his accountant who moonlights as a pit fighter. Together with a whisky-loving hobgoblin known as Buck Foi and the ancient Druid Atticus O’Sullivan, along with his dogs, Oberon and Starbuck, Al and Nadia will face down the wildest wonders Australia—and the supernatural world—can throw at them, and confront a legendary monster not seen in centuries.
The novel kicks off as Al comes to realize a Sigil agent, Sifu Lin, is missing in Australia, so he immediately sets out for Australia with Sifu Lin, Chen Ya-ping’s apprentice, his assistant Nadia and his sidekick/protégé Buck Foi, the hobgoblin whose foul mouth and less than cordial nature play nicely against Al’s more reserved manner. The Iron Druid himself, Atticus (now known as Connor) finds that he can help Al since finding Sifu Lin aligns with a potential lead for something he’s investigating as well. Sigil agents aren’t beholden to any single pantheon and are more or less free agents who act as agents against rogue demigods and monsters from across the breadth of pantheons. That doesn’t necessarily suggest they don’t make enemies or fall afoul of such supernatural creatures. Thus, Al finds himself in the Dandenong Mountains in Victoria, Australia trying to find one of his peers.
Al already has the equivalent of a really good Dungeons and Dragons adventuring party on this quest to find his colleague, but the “party” expands. Somehow in the middle of this quest, Al’s receptionist Gladys Who Has Seen Some Shite appears on the road. Al is surprised because all he really knows about her is that she is Canadian, but as a couple of characters point out, “she is also Canadian” as in she is much more than she seems. This is a great example of how Hearne intriguingly layers details to the world-at-large of his stories as well as depth to the orbit of the main characters about whom he writes. Those layers come into play with Atticus and his hounds being players in this story, as some threads from Atticus’s series were addressed in this novel.
I enjoyed the rather clean break from The Iron Druid Saga when this series started. I was pleased to see another character who inhabits this world with such a different perspective from the perspective Iron Druid. That said, making Atticus a supporting character in Al’s story was an interesting take. It was refreshing to see other people’s unflinching take on the aged Druid, since most of what readers have seen of the Iron Druid comes from Atticus’s first-person perspective.
Like the best installments of any series, Paper & Blood concludes the storyline introduced in the early chapters, adds layers to long-term plot points in the first novel of the series, and introduced a couple of new wrinkles into the cloth of the story. Hearne is really, really good at writing series books, there is rarely if ever a dip in quality from a first book to any of the subsequent books and that is most definitely true of Paper & Blood. I’m very much looking forward to hearing more from Al MacBharrais.
Recommended.
© 2021 Rob H. Bedford
Book Two of Ink & Sigil
Published by Del Rey Books | August 2021
https://kevinhearne.com/books/paper-blood/
Review copy courtesy of the publisher
