Clay White (Bureau #2), by Kim Fielding

Someone-or something-is murdering young men in San Francisco. Clay White has been fired from the Bureau of Trans-Species Affairs, but he’s determined to track down the killer. When he comes across a vampire named Marek, Clay assumes he’s caught the perp. But the encounter with Marek turns out to be more complicated than Clay expected, and it forces him to deal with his own troubled past and murky psyche. As Clay discovers, sometimes the truth doesn’t come easy-and the monsters are not who we expect.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

My goodness, but Kim Fielding excels at creating atmosphere in her writing. The first Bureau novella (Corruption – my review) put the reader in the heart of Kansas during the Dust Bowl years. With Clay White we’re in the present time, in gritty downtown San Francisco – the clubs, the alleys, the vacant storefronts.

I really liked this story for what is stated and what is unstated. There are some details of the characters’ past which are hinted at, but aren’t laid out in long exposition (which is good, given this is also a novella!). We get enough to understand the characters and their motivations, and that’s enough. I also love when a character’s beliefs are challenged and they are forced to rethink things they had always taken as facts. How they come to grips with this is a big part of making a character come alive for me.

Although I suppose that this story could be read by itself, but given the recurrences in theme and characters you’d really be best served if you read Corruption first. Taken together these are both excellent reading. I hope that we’ll hear more from Fielding’s Bureau universe!