![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Marjorie Liu books.
Sep. 22nd, 2012 12:22 amTiger Eye, Shadow Touch, The Red Heart of Jade, and Eye of Heaven, by Marjorie Liu
These are the first four books in Liu's Dirk and Steele paranormal romance series. Dirk and Steele is a "detective agency" that's basically the paranormal romance X-Men - people with various magical and psychic powers running around saving the world every couple months. Characters make fun of the name in every book, and are pretty uniformly familiar with the genre they're in. They remain, however, very much bound by said genre's conventions. So, if you don't like paranormal romances, you won't like these; if you do, you probably will. They're pretty good at being what they are.
Each of the books involves a Dirk and Steele associate encountering someone with some sort of magical powers and helping them out of a bad situation, while defeating some towering villain or conspiracy. To summarize:
Tiger Eye - Dela, who can do weird things with metal, comes into possession of a magic box which allows her to control Hari, an immortal shapeshifter guy who is not very happy about the box. There is also an evil wizard. They fall in love (Dela and Hari; the evil wizard's involved only peripherally), taking a short break to introduce the male protagonists of the next three books. This is set mostly in Hong Kong, which, like World of Warcraft, is just chock-full of dragons pretending to be human and making unreasonable demands of passers-by.
Shadow Touch - Artur, a psychometrist who used to be a member of the Russian mafia, is kidnapped by the Syndicate, Dirk and Steele's inevitable evil rival organization. There, he meets Elena, who has been kidnapped for her healing powers, as well as various other people whose romantic fates will presumably be dealt with in later books.
Set in Russia, which, as we all know, is populated almost entirely by mafiosi, secret agents, and ballerinas.
The Red Heart of Jade - Dean, who can sense the location of anything or anyone that he's encountered once, is in Taiwan trying to catch a serial killer, and runs into Mirabelle, his childhood first love. Both have thought the other was dead since they were teenagers, for reasons that don't hold up to much scrutiny, but whatever. Mirabelle's an archaeologist now, and obviously has just found the magical artifact that the serial killer has been searching for all this time. And then there's reincarnation and flashbacks and mutilation and all of a sudden Dean can teleport and whoa. The ending is kind of just a bunch of things smashing together; I think I understood what happened, but that's mainly because I read a lot of manga.
Mainland China and Taiwan, too, turn out to be located somewhere within World of Warcraft, but we have yet to establish the precise whereabouts of the rest of East Asia. It'll probably be cleared up in a later book.
Eye of Heaven - Blue, who can control electricity, has an evil billionaire father who has just faked his own death, and is blackmailing Blue into finding the telekinetic half-brother he never knew he had, who has run away to join the circus. Both brothers fall in love with the lion tamer, Iris, who happens to be a were-leopard. Things continue to get sillier. Subplot themes include organ transplants, long-lost mothers, three or four separate evil organizations which are trying to kidnap one or all of these characters, someone losing an eye, and I think the cast of Yami no Matsuei ran through the background real fast at one point.
These are the first four books in Liu's Dirk and Steele paranormal romance series. Dirk and Steele is a "detective agency" that's basically the paranormal romance X-Men - people with various magical and psychic powers running around saving the world every couple months. Characters make fun of the name in every book, and are pretty uniformly familiar with the genre they're in. They remain, however, very much bound by said genre's conventions. So, if you don't like paranormal romances, you won't like these; if you do, you probably will. They're pretty good at being what they are.
Each of the books involves a Dirk and Steele associate encountering someone with some sort of magical powers and helping them out of a bad situation, while defeating some towering villain or conspiracy. To summarize:
Tiger Eye - Dela, who can do weird things with metal, comes into possession of a magic box which allows her to control Hari, an immortal shapeshifter guy who is not very happy about the box. There is also an evil wizard. They fall in love (Dela and Hari; the evil wizard's involved only peripherally), taking a short break to introduce the male protagonists of the next three books. This is set mostly in Hong Kong, which, like World of Warcraft, is just chock-full of dragons pretending to be human and making unreasonable demands of passers-by.
Shadow Touch - Artur, a psychometrist who used to be a member of the Russian mafia, is kidnapped by the Syndicate, Dirk and Steele's inevitable evil rival organization. There, he meets Elena, who has been kidnapped for her healing powers, as well as various other people whose romantic fates will presumably be dealt with in later books.
Set in Russia, which, as we all know, is populated almost entirely by mafiosi, secret agents, and ballerinas.
The Red Heart of Jade - Dean, who can sense the location of anything or anyone that he's encountered once, is in Taiwan trying to catch a serial killer, and runs into Mirabelle, his childhood first love. Both have thought the other was dead since they were teenagers, for reasons that don't hold up to much scrutiny, but whatever. Mirabelle's an archaeologist now, and obviously has just found the magical artifact that the serial killer has been searching for all this time. And then there's reincarnation and flashbacks and mutilation and all of a sudden Dean can teleport and whoa. The ending is kind of just a bunch of things smashing together; I think I understood what happened, but that's mainly because I read a lot of manga.
Mainland China and Taiwan, too, turn out to be located somewhere within World of Warcraft, but we have yet to establish the precise whereabouts of the rest of East Asia. It'll probably be cleared up in a later book.
Eye of Heaven - Blue, who can control electricity, has an evil billionaire father who has just faked his own death, and is blackmailing Blue into finding the telekinetic half-brother he never knew he had, who has run away to join the circus. Both brothers fall in love with the lion tamer, Iris, who happens to be a were-leopard. Things continue to get sillier. Subplot themes include organ transplants, long-lost mothers, three or four separate evil organizations which are trying to kidnap one or all of these characters, someone losing an eye, and I think the cast of Yami no Matsuei ran through the background real fast at one point.
