Magic for Nothing – Seanan McGuire

Good character, good writing, disappointing story. The good character is Antimony Price - the younger sister of the protagonists of the earlier books in this series. The good writing is a given for McGuire.

The plot wasn’t going to work. The idea of sending Antimony undercover to the Covenant of St. George is, as the author admits up front, a bad plan. It’s pretty-much a given that anyone joining the Covenant was going to have to prove her loyalty, which was going to be an eventually-insurmountable problem. The notion that Antimony could learn anything that would make a difference to her family’s survival was never well-supported. It’s a tribute to the author’s skill that the story fizzled out as gently as it did.