Books about women fighting evil (or for evil)

LAZARUS: Cull and LAZARUS: Fracture 1 by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark (the Owen Freeman cover is from an earlier issue) continue the story I stopped following during the pandemic (I read Cull back in 2019 but forgot). With the head of House Carlyle severely injured, eldest daughter Johanna takes charge while Forever — the “Lazarus” with healing factor and deadly fighting skills — handles threats in the field. Can Johanna steer through the changing political landscape? Can Forever take down deadly adversaries such as the Dragon, another family’s psycho Lazarus? What about Forever’s clone Eve? Solidly readable but I can’t say I regret my decision to get these books from the library rather than buy.

While I liked Nicole Givens Kurtz’s Kill Three Birds, I think the sequel, A THEFT MOST FOWL: A Kingdom of Aves Mystery improves on it. The setting, a kingdom where society divides into avian sects (doves for spiritual guidance, nightjars for graveyard shift, hawks to investigate crimes), is as interesting as the first book but I think the mystery (dealing with the theft of a sacred relic) holds together better.

I get disappointed by a lot of self-published urban fantasy but as I live in North Carolina I couldn’t turn down WITCHWOOD: The Carolina Files Book 1 by Willa Blackmore. While I didn’t find it as Southern as Windmaster’s Bane (cover by Tim White) or Alex Bledsoe’s Tufa books, I did like it — I’ll probably try book two at some point (I don’t say that about all Southern fantasy).

Tula is one of the Whitlow witches who handle problems in their section of the Carolinas. They’ve never had to deal with the kind of threats Harry Dresden does and by and large the family’s a mess — mom’s never taught her girls half what they need to know and Tula’s sisters are respectively a fashionista and a drunk. Still, when an FBI agent asks Tula to help him investigate a supernatural force that’s put his sister in the ICU, how can she say no? Tula learns a local winery hides an evil Druidic cult that’s attempting to incarnate a Green Man and the sister is collateral damage; the Whitlow witches, however, are directly in the cult’s magical gunsights.

This was good entertainment though I find “witch” freighted with so many meanings (when I wrote a witch into an unpublished novel years ago, I made a point to establish she wasn’t wiccan) I sometimes wish authors would use “wizard” or “magician” instead (though I’ve had friends who think Harry Potter makes anyone else using “wizard” a no-go).

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