Ballad of the Bone Road by AC Wise

Ballad of the Bone Road by AC is Wise is a golden-age-of-Hollywood urban fantasy. Set in a country that is maybe 80% 1950s Los Angeles with a hint of the United Kingdom, in a world in which the fae walked, until they didn’t. It is a mix of styles and ideas that struggles to work, held together by a plot involving pair of flawed investigators involves in two different but related cases.

Belleweather and Sydney Brix are partners in some sort of investigation agency that clearly does not make money by charging its clients. The city they live in, Port Astor, is very much like Los Angeles in the 1960s. Port Astor used to host the fae but for some reason, never really explained, the fae all picked up and left about forty years before and their access to the human world was blocked off using iron by wealthy industrialists. The pair are intrigued when someone comes to them claiming that a room at the famous Peony Hotel has disappeared. Before they can get too far into that investigation, however, Belleweather’s estranged sister Dee comes to town to ask for help as she suspects that her preacher husband is having an affair.

Belleweather and Brix have issues of their own. Brix is a ghost whisperer with access to something called the Bone Road, which is where ghosts go when they depart this realm. But Brix has used his power to keep the ghost of his girlfriend in the world because he cannot stand to let her go. Meanwhile Belleweather plays host to a demon who lives within her flesh which is part of the reason she is estranged from her fundamentalist family. The two jobs that they go on – the haunting at the hotel and the wayward preacher – play directly into their personal issues, complicating the situation somewhat.

Ballad of the Bone Road is a little overstuffed and not everything about it makes a whole lot of sense. Wise draws on a range of different mystical traditions – the fae, the wild hunt, ghosts – but not in a way that is always coherent or at least well explained. But Wise does not give enough of a sense of what the world was like when the fae were there to allow readers to understand how it has changed. And her main antagonist, the Hollow Queen, seems to be fae but maybe not the same as the ones who were there before.

Some of this does not really matter so long as reader’s buy into the premise. The characters are engaging, the setting is stylish and the plot barrels along, leaving little time to worry about trying to understand exactly what is going on and how it works (for example, who exactly is the Hollow Queen and what does she want? Why do only some people have access to the Bone Road? Why does Brix seem to talk with a kind of British accent and call everyone “luv”?). But while there is some enjoyment to be had with Ballad of the Bone Road, it does end up missing the mark.

Ballad of the Bone Road by AC Wise

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6.0/10