An Easy Death – Charlaine Harris

“An Easy Death” sets the stage for a new series, and the series has promise. The year is approximately 1940, and history diverged from ours earlier in the century: Between a worse Influenza epidemic and a worse depression, the US has collapsed and been balkanized. (The book starts in Texoma, which is north of land retaken by Mexico, and east of California - which is ruled by the Romanovs, who in this world escaped after the Russian revolution.) Actually, the divergence must have started earlier, because the Romanovs emply a fair number of magicians.

Rose is a nineteen-year-old gunslinger, and a good one. She is hired by two magicians who want a guide/guard while they go to Mexico in search of a living descendant of Rasputin. Someone must want them to fail, because an absurdly-large number of people try to kill them along the way.

As a stand-alone novel, AED is only adequate. Rose and her employers travel south, people keep jumping out of the woodwork to kill them, and mostly Rose shoots them. The novel isn’t meant to stand alone, of course; it is meant to set the scene for sequels and to introduce some of the characters. So reviewing it is like reviewing the first few chapters of a stand-alone novel: It doesn’t stand that well on its own, but it isn’t meant to - and it might be the start of something good.