“One Salt Sea”

“One Salt Sea” is Seanan McGuire’s 5th novel about San Francisco’s half-Fae private investigator October Daye. Not only is her appartment threatening to turn into something that’d make Mrs. Madrigal proud, but she’s now also the Countess of Goldengreen, a place that straddles our world and the Summer Lands. It’s all quite a responsibility, but nothing like what comes crashing down when San Francisco’s Queen of the Mists announces that the Sea’s Queen has declared war. The latter’s two sons have disappeared and October sees no way to prevent the war other than to volunteer and find who really is behind this. She’d have done it anyway because that’s who she is, but the stakes become very personal when her long-estranged human daughter is also abducted, and when she finds out that what’s going on is the result of her one big failure years before. As Shakespeare is quoted saying at the beginning:

"As many arrows, loosed several ways, come to one mark;
As many ways meet in one town;
As many streams meet in one salt sea;
So many a thousand actions, one afoot, end in one purpose.”

That novel is going on my list of Hugo nominees.