Smoke and Shadows is Tanya Huff’s attempt to resurrect her Vicki Nelson Investigations series. This time, one of the bit characters from the earlier series is faced with a supernatural threat while working odd jobs on a movie set, and he must manage to respond to it without the benefit of Vicki’s experience. His only ally is Henry, another of the original characters, and Henry has a problem with daylight…
Smoke and Shadows is the latest “Vicki Nelson” novel. I suspect Tanya is returning to that universe for financial reasons, because the book itself feels like a “paint-by-numbers” effort that could have been spawned from a random plot generator. Vicki herself makes no appearance, and Henry plays a role that could be described as “muscle” – if you were feeling like flattery, which any fan of this series won’t be.
If that’s not enough of a dire warning to drive you away from the book, read on. Because it’s not really that bad. It’s just stuck on the lower end of the Vicki Nelson series, and that particular series started at mediocre and went downhill about the time the corpse of Vicki’s mother was turned into an undead robot by a deranged mortician. This book isn’t THAT bad. In fact, after that disaster, it’s almost a return to form. But it’s definitely not as interesting as the first three.
Note that, after reading Smoke and Mirrors, it becomes clear that this better described as a spinoff of the Vicki Nelson series rather than a continuation of it. The focus is all on the secondary characters.
