Bornikova, Phillipa: Box Office Poison (2013)

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=Tamar

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May 20, 2012
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Bornikova, Phillipa: Box Office Poison (2013)
The second book in the urban fantasy series about a woman lawyer with peculiar luck in a world where the three Powers - vampires, werewolves, and elves - have been assimilating into human society for fifty years. Linnet Ellery works for a vampire-owned law firm and in this volume she and her boss go to Hollywood to deal with a lawsuit, human actors against elves (the Alfar). The humans say the elves have been using magic to get all the good roles. Alfar have been in the news lately for some spectacular murders. Is there a connection? Well, obviously, this a novel, but it's a little more complex than that.

I found this a reasonably good mystery with some clever ideas about how such a situation could work. The Alfar are not quite as dangerous as Pratchett's elves, fortunately, but like the other Powers, they are genuinely risky to deal with.

This is a Tor book, which I find sadly disappointing because of the number of errors in it. It's as though someone thought spell-check would find all the errors, and didn't bother to notice the homonym problem. I checked the publisher because I thought it might have been self-published. Gaff for gaffe, naval for navel, demur for demure, hoard for horde, and the more usual then for than, effect for affect problems, plus a couple of genuine typographical errors not caught because they were in people's names. It didn't ruin the book for me but it did yank me out of the story. Reviews of the first book indicate that there were typos in it as well. Not good, Tor.

Bornikova is a pseudonym for Melinda Snodgrass, who is an experienced author in other styles.
I haven't read the first (This Case Will Kill Me, 2012) nor the third (Publish and Perish, 2018) novel. I don't know whether the author has an explanation for the main character's unusual luck. Supposedly there was to be a fourth book but it hasn't happened yet.
 
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