Lightning Runes (City of Shadows, 2) by Harry Turtledove Narrator: Paul Boehmer
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: alternate history, fantasy, paranormal, urban fantasy
Series: City of Shadows #2
Pages: 354
Length: 13 hours and 8 minutes
Published by Caezik SF & Fantasy, Tantor Media on April 16, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
Hardboiled Noir meets Urban Fantasy in a post-WWII Los Angeles where vampires, zombies, and demons are part of the social fabric.
Magic is just another way to get killed in the City of Angels.
Los Angeles, 1940s. The war is over, but the shadows are growing teeth. In this gritty Historical Urban Fantasy, detective work requires more than a badge and a .38. It requires an understanding of the runes that thrum beneath the pavement.
It started with a knock on the door. It usually does. Now there’s a body, a missing musician, and a trail of magic that smells like ozone and bad luck. The LAPD is out of its depth. The "square" world is waking up to a reality they aren't prepared to handle.
My Review:
I picked this up because I fell hard for the first book in the series, Twice as Dead and was hoping for more of the same. That first book managed to combine the hard-boiled, noir-ish sensibilities of down-on-their-luck detectives like Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and Easy Rawlins with the paranormal world of Dan Shambles into an urban fantasy that mixed the best of the ‘old skool’ of that genre with a bit of paranormal romance and the kind of thoroughgoing alternate world building that the author is famous for.
The City of Shadows that the series is set in is an alternate version of Los Angeles in a slightly skewed version of our own world. A world where all the creatures that go bump in the night – wizards, vampires, werewolves, ghosts and zombies, among others, are a known and sorta/kinda accepted part of society. About as well accepted as any other minority population, but also known to be just as real even if just as looked down upon as any other such group.
We never do find out whether the vampires, etc., came out of the coffin one relatively recent dark night or whether their existence has been accepted all along. We are, however, in a 1940s post-World War II era where the powers lined up more or less the same way but under different names – and with the supernatural fighting on both sides.
Just as in the first book, P.I. Jack Mitchell has several cases on his desk that he’s all too afraid are going to turn out to be one big, nasty mess. And he’s right. The vampire whose Nazi views and aggressive behavior drawing the wrong kind of attention to Vampire Village, the werewolf stalking the streets on full moon nights, the mob involvement in the record business AND the blackmail of the queer, black owners of the best jazz club in town shouldn’t have anything to do with each other. But Jack’s luck doesn’t work that way.
He knows they’ll be connected, if only to make his life that much more difficult and in that much more peril. All he has to do is keep his own skin in one piece long enough to unwind all the tangled threads of the case before they can tie him down or burn him out – again – and this time for good.
Escape Rating B: The cover of Lightning Runes sums up my mixed feelings a whole lot better than I ever expected. First, vampire Dora Urban wouldn’t be caught alive, unalive or dead in that dress or with that ridiculous expression on her face. Even after centuries – or more – as a vampire she’s still too much of an aristocrat for either. Meanwhile, there’s something wrong, like uncanny valley wrong or human bodies don’t quite work that way wrong, with the man standing in for Jack Mitchell. The story was like that too for me, a sense of ‘almost but not quite’ right – or at least not quite as good as the first book.
I really wanted to love this one because Twice as Dead was just so good. Parts of this WERE good. The cases were fascinating, the way that they came together took dogged investigation and a bit of luck and the way that Jack teased around all the edges of everything until the pieces started coming together was compelling. The way that Jack gathered more friends around him than he ever thought he’d have to get the job done was terrific.
But, and it’s a fairly big but, the pace slowed down every single time that Jack either got lost in his memories or got pulled down inside his own head in his totally righteous resentment of the way that the US of his 1940s – and ours – did not live up to the image it had of itself as the land of the free, the home of the brave, where all men are created equal.
Because he knows first-hand it’s not true. Jack is mixed-race, able to ‘pass’ in either direction. He sees the way the corrupt LAPD pull over men just a shade darker than himself for beatdowns in plain sight that people just pretend isn’t happening right before their eyes. He knows it could be him.
In the wake of their version of World War II, Jack still gets nightmares about his service during the war, even as he’s thinking about where he would have ended up if he hadn’t passed and wondering whether it would have been safer AND less scarring to be with the black troops or whether he’d just have a different set of scars.
While the many Jews in his neighborhood, and among his friends, remind him that there are people who have it WAY worse than he ever did – and that it’s all wrong and doesn’t look like it’s going to get righted anytime soon – if at all.
All of the above is, well, real. Very real. And it’s equally realistic that Jack thinks about all of it, gets reminded of the war all too often because he’s still fighting it in his head, hates the new ‘restricted’ neighborhoods – restricted to white people only, no nonwhites, no Jews allowed in spite of the laws against such restrictions – and seethes about all of it. That the villain this time around is his world’s equivalent of an SS officer who seems to be hell-bent on resurrecting his ‘Leader’s’ plans and policies in the US – if not the actual bastard himself – continuously pokes Mitchell’s wounds and resentments throughout the entire story.
The issue, as far as the book is concerned, is that it pulls the reader out of the story every time Jack goes down into these dark trenches, and he does it a LOT. I both sympathized and empathized with him every single time, but it either happened too often or went too deep and too far and too much.
After all of Jack’s internal angst, the ending was a bit anticlimactic – and a bit of a deus ex machina. It was also a lot of fun, a popping of a huge balloon of tense anticipation with the lolloping of a ginormous shaggy dog. But as fun and funny as it was while it was happening, it was almost forgettable after the dark depths of the case itself. Your reading mileage may vary.
Or listening mileage, as the story lends itself well to audio with its first-person protagonist, very much in the Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe talking to himself and breaking the fourth wall kind of way. That being said, I kept waffling between thinking that Jack Mitchell didn’t sound as much like Spade or Marlowe as he thought he did or that the narrator didn’t sound quite as much like portrayals of Spade or Marlowe as I thought he ought to have. Your listening mileage may seriously vary on that one, especially as it may just be that Humphrey Bogart cast such a long, gravelly shadow as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon that it’s STILL impossible to shake.
In the end, I have to say that I liked this rather than loved it the way I did Twice as Dead. But I liked it more than enough to want to see it continue. I also need to find out how Jack’s office cats, Old Man Mose and Mehitabel are doing – and what they’re doing to destroy Jack’s office even more!
