I bought this back in February, but did not get around to reading it until now. It is the second book in a series and this series is related to another series by the same author. I haven’t read the main series, altho I _did_ read Binding Shadows, the book before this one. I think you could probably read this book entirely independent of everything else and it would be okay.
SPOILERS! Probably, anyway, warning because I cannot be bothered to be careful.
Mostly set in Prague, altho parts of it are set in the much smaller village of Jevany.
The witch, Barbara, from the first book is now living in the family building with Tobias. We see a little bit of everyone — Dad/Lukas, Mom/Beryl, brothers Markus, Tobias and Christof. We don’t meet the spirit of the city but we do meet her sister, which is kinda cool. This book is the story of Mark, who works for Anton doing demo, but wishes he could be doing construction. Anton and Lukas are friends from way back, and when Mark needed a job and had a lot of attitude, Anton helped out. But Anton has been working for the local mob, and sets Mark up with a job with that local mob and it is not looking great.
On a demo job at the beginning of the book, Mark meets Evie, also a witch. They have anonymous sex in the woods, when he sneaks off at lunch time to go for a swim and she sneaks out to get away from the guard the mob has put on her. She is pretending to be a mistress of the local mob boss, but is actually keeping an eye on the books for him to catch people who are skimming. The sex stops being anonymous and they stop having it. The demo job ends, and Mark spends a night guarding a delivery of supplies. He’s shot while in wolf-form and runs to the woods and meets Evie, who is able to heal him. And then they both leave Jevany to return to Prague, thinking they will never see each other gain, except remember, they are both working for the mob boss.
The mob boss is up to some new, lucrative thing that Evie can’t quite figure out what it is, and Mark has been hired to build a bunch of small, heavily fortified, with locks on them rooms in the basement. He in initially tells himself it’s a sex dungeon set up (the building is a gentleman’s club), but after a while, he gets suspicious because it is way overbuilt. Meanwhile, supernaturals who struggle to pass as human are disappearing, and Mark’s family is trying to figure out where they are going. All of these threads converge.
Silvera does a _really_ good job with the slow build on the relationship and on the nightmarish intrigues going on around them. And the denouement is very satisfying, altho I am increasingly suspicious that I should just go read the other series, because the Much More Powerful characters seem to be from that series.
Anyway. This is great stuff, and I look forward to book 3, which I assume will be Christof’s story.
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