Magic Bites was honestly decent Urban Fantasy. Strong characters with more than one dimension (admittedly sometimes only barely), a mythology that doesn’t suck, real life that’s not just “grizzled detective showing off his depression” – yeah, I can get behind this.
I’m especially interested in the magic/technology split in the worldbuilding. Magic is something like the tide, rising and ebbing, so people have to have two cars, and have to switch to the non-tech one when magic rises. It’s weird, and interesting, and I appreciate that it’s not explained at all. It’s implied that magic only really started to be a thing more recently, so there’s not a lot of historical divergance, and I expect the series will slowly explore what happened to the world, and also go into our heroine’s parentage.
As for Kate Daniels, the protagonist: At first I thought she’d be the very generic loudmouth badass Buffy-style fetish girl hero, and while she takes on parts of the trope, it’s not obnoxious or over the top. Where her reactions are defense mechanisms, this is addressed, and where she’s just a witty badass … that’s fine too, to be honest. This series is not reaching for any literary heights, but it was definitely fun to read.
