Dark Alchemy

[sawyl]

Urban fantasy meets weird west in Laura Bickle's Dark Alchemy. Set in the present day in the small town of Temperance, Wyoming, on the edge of Yellowstone National Park, it opens with Petra Dee, a geologist fleeing a recent personal tragedy, arriving to take up a new job working for the US Geological Survey. It's obvious from the prologue, which sees a ranch hand turning himself into a raven, that there are supernatural forces at work in Temperance, but it takes the rational lead character a while to come to terms with her new situation.

From the very first it becomes apparent that Temperances isn't going to be the refuge Petra has been looking for. After an early run-in with a group of meth addicts, she sees on of Sal Rutherford's men beaten almost to death with a fence post while most of the locals look on uncaring. The only other person to intervene is Maria Yellowrose, who happens to be the niece of the guy issuing the beating. Petra and Maria hit it off, not least because Petra buys her truck, and Maria warns her to say clear of Rutherford and his gang of henchmen — a lesson that becomes doubly clear when Petra sees Gabriel, the injured man, completely whole and unharmed less than a day the attack.

There's also the small matter of Petra's father's medallion, sent to her twenty years earlier just before he vanished from her life. Showing a lion eating the sun, it not only catches Gabriel's attention but, when Petra is woken in middle of her first night by a coyote digging close to her trailer, she finds a compass of much the same design. When she shows the compass to the local assayer, he immediately betrays her discovery to Stroud, the town's meth cook and alchemist, who promptly tries to obtain the compass by every means at his disposal, including writing sinister symbols in mercury outside her Airstream. Fortunate, Petra is not alone: the cheeky coyote, whom she dubs Sig, has decided to move in with her and proves to be a determined and loyal companion.

The mystery plot kicks in when Petra, in her first day on the job, out taking samples up on Specimen Ridge, stumbles across the body of a hiker who seems to be dying of a disease that has caused out of control bone growth. When she finally escapes the cavalry — park rangers and CDC — and returns to Temperance, Petra overhears one of Rutherford's men shooting his mouth off about his discovery of series of similiar cases of the diseases out on the ranch. But before the man can elaborate, he is interrupted by the arrival of Gabriel and his Hanged Men, who seize him and bundle him off — but not before Petra is able to convince Gabe to run the man out of town rather than killing him.

I enjoyed Dark Alchemy a lot, largely thanks to its likeable and capable protagonist. Bickle pulls an entertaining switch, having Petra by a duster and a set of antique Colt pistols early on, apparently preparing the reader for the main character's transformation into a kick-ass urban fantasy heroine, but when push comes to shove Petra generally chooses the smarter path, eschewing epic confrontational violence for something a bit more productive. It's intersting to watch a deeply rational scientist, confronted with unequivocal evidence of the supernatural — including her very own spirit journey — deciding to accept that this stuff really does exist and, given that, her next steps should be to analyse the hell out of it using a trailer-made spectroscope with a CD serving as a diffraction grating.

I was pleased to discover, shortly after reading it, that Laura Bickle has a sequel due out at the end of October, so I won't have to wait long to discover what Petra and Sig get up to next...