Night Child by Jes BattisNight Child is the debut novel from author Jes Battis and it focuses on Tess Corday, and OSI-1 investigator who stumbles into a mysterious case involving a dead vampire and a teenage girl named Mia. I think the best way to describe this novel is think Buffy, the Vampire Slayer/Charmed meets CSI with a dark twist.
The main character, Tess Corday is actually a very likable, first person narrator. I have found that quite often it is difficult to like the main character in a first person novel, but here Tess is a fun, feisty, relateable character whose tenancy to act first and think later is all part of her charm. We get the story through her eyes, so one of the most likable characters in the novel is her best friend and college Derrick who takes on the sidekick role and often gets some of the best lines his relationship with Tess is a fun, deep and trusting friendship. We also have other characters such as Lucian a necromancer who Tess is drawn to, Selena Tess' boss/teacher who I found to be another extremely likable character and Marcus the big boss who isn't the friendliest of people towards Tess.
The story itself has a good few twists and turns, the story is well developed and well thought out and the main twist at the end was surprising in some ways, but in others I managed to figure out what was going on as the book progressed. Battis makes good use of mythology, often exploring different supernatural elements such as scyring, glamouring, telepathy as well as having a whole cast of characters with special powers and different supernatural beings such as mages, vampires and necromancers.
I picked this novel up after wanting to read it for quite some time, and although it did take me a while to get into it - likely due to the amount of technical babble that the author has chosen to include, once I got about half way through I couldn't put it down until I finished, in fact I think I read the last third of it in one sitting almost. But there is, as I said quite a lot of technical language relating to forensics and that side of the novel, which I can't make my mind up over if I think it helped the novel or not. I think what makes the novel different is the inclusion of all the forensics language, so it kind of makes the supernatural side of the story fit better into the real world because it creates scientific explanations of what is going on and obviously it is all fantasy, but Battis does a good job of making it sound "real". The writing is top notch, there are a lot of pop culture references, perhaps a few too many sometimes but it's all part of the tone of the book and again, makes you think of Buffy.
One thing that did bother me slightly was the ending, there seemed to be a lack of closure for such a well thought out, well researched and well written novel. The story kind of just stopped, I would have liked to have seen what happened after the action stopped and the villains were defeated, I don't know maybe we'll find out in the next book but it would have been nice to have been left with a sense of closure. This is probably one of my only major complaints about the novel, because other than the fairly abrupt ending the story was great.
Overall, this is a decent debut novel and I will be picking up the sequel A Flash of Hex. Hopefully by then Battis will have perfected the balance between supernatural, fantasy and technical jargon because here the technical language does seem to take over the main narrative from time to time but this is still an interesting and entertaining read for fans of the urban fantasy genre.
The main character, Tess Corday is actually a very likable, first person narrator. I have found that quite often it is difficult to like the main character in a first person novel, but here Tess is a fun, feisty, relateable character whose tenancy to act first and think later is all part of her charm. We get the story through her eyes, so one of the most likable characters in the novel is her best friend and college Derrick who takes on the sidekick role and often gets some of the best lines his relationship with Tess is a fun, deep and trusting friendship. We also have other characters such as Lucian a necromancer who Tess is drawn to, Selena Tess' boss/teacher who I found to be another extremely likable character and Marcus the big boss who isn't the friendliest of people towards Tess.
The story itself has a good few twists and turns, the story is well developed and well thought out and the main twist at the end was surprising in some ways, but in others I managed to figure out what was going on as the book progressed. Battis makes good use of mythology, often exploring different supernatural elements such as scyring, glamouring, telepathy as well as having a whole cast of characters with special powers and different supernatural beings such as mages, vampires and necromancers.
I picked this novel up after wanting to read it for quite some time, and although it did take me a while to get into it - likely due to the amount of technical babble that the author has chosen to include, once I got about half way through I couldn't put it down until I finished, in fact I think I read the last third of it in one sitting almost. But there is, as I said quite a lot of technical language relating to forensics and that side of the novel, which I can't make my mind up over if I think it helped the novel or not. I think what makes the novel different is the inclusion of all the forensics language, so it kind of makes the supernatural side of the story fit better into the real world because it creates scientific explanations of what is going on and obviously it is all fantasy, but Battis does a good job of making it sound "real". The writing is top notch, there are a lot of pop culture references, perhaps a few too many sometimes but it's all part of the tone of the book and again, makes you think of Buffy.
One thing that did bother me slightly was the ending, there seemed to be a lack of closure for such a well thought out, well researched and well written novel. The story kind of just stopped, I would have liked to have seen what happened after the action stopped and the villains were defeated, I don't know maybe we'll find out in the next book but it would have been nice to have been left with a sense of closure. This is probably one of my only major complaints about the novel, because other than the fairly abrupt ending the story was great.
Overall, this is a decent debut novel and I will be picking up the sequel A Flash of Hex. Hopefully by then Battis will have perfected the balance between supernatural, fantasy and technical jargon because here the technical language does seem to take over the main narrative from time to time but this is still an interesting and entertaining read for fans of the urban fantasy genre.
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