Midnight Taxi Tango
Daniel José Older’s Bone Street Rumba series is my new crack. It’s similar to The Dresden Files in quality and tone, but it has a far more realistically diverse group of characters. The main character is Carlos, who is half-dead and half-alive due to being partially resurrected. Carlos lives, so to speak, in a version of Brooklyn that is populated with humans, ghosts, demons, magic practitioners, and, most terrifying of all, hipsters. He can converse with all groups with equal ease because of his “between worlds” state.
The first book in the series, Half-Resurrection Blues, was told from Carlos’s point of view. It set up the world, gave us a lot of action, and introduced an impressively tortured romance between Carlos and Sasha.
Another novel, Shadowshaper ( A | BN | K | G | AB ), is a young adult novel with new characters, set in the same world. (Sarah reviewed Shadowshaper when it came out.) We pick up Carlos’s story again in Midnight Taxi Tango. This book has chapters from the points of view of three characters: Carlos, Kia (a teenage girl who studies Capoeira), and Reza (a lesbian enforcer who works for a crime lord and who has a crush on a quirky and wonderful librarian).
This series is thrilling because it’s stunningly well crafted and intensely exciting. It’s also a thrilling series because of the range of characters. Carlos encounters male, female, straight, gay, Brazilian, Puerto Rican, Hasidic, African-American, and Native American characters. The concept of New York City as a diverse place is central to the story, as are issues surrounding identity and culture.
Be aware that Midnight Taxi Tango is by far the most violent of the three books and also involves giant swarms of cockroaches. If you have issues with bugs, you’ll read this while holding the book in one hand and a can of Raid in the other. It’s not for the faint of heart, but fans of urban fantasy will find it to be immensely rewarding.
– Carrie S
The author of Half-Resurrection Blues returns in a new Bone Street Rumba Novel—a knife-edge, noir-shaded urban fantasy of crime after death.
The streets of New York are hungry tonight…
Carlos Delacruz straddles the line between the living and the not-so alive. As an agent for the Council of the Dead, he eliminates New York’s ghostlier problems. This time it’s a string of gruesome paranormal accidents in Brooklyn’s Von King Park that has already taken the lives of several locals—and is bound to take more.
The incidents in the park have put Kia on edge. When she first met Carlos, he was the weird guy who came to Baba Eddie’s botánica, where she worked. But the closer they’ve gotten, the more she’s seeing the world from Carlos’s point of view. In fact, she’s starting to see ghosts. And the situation is far more sinister than that—because whatever is bringing out the dead, it’s only just getting started.
Urban Fantasy
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The worldbuilding in these books is great but… I can’t believe you liked the romance. The way he described her breasts is like a male author joke and the love before first sight trope is so silly.