Blood Debts
Terry J Benton-Walker
A frenetic debut
Blood Debts begins with two pages of family trees of five families. Thirty-three people are named in these family trees, nine dead and 24 living. These 33 people, together with a few others who don't belong to those five families, make up the cast of Blood Debts. Yes, even the dead ones. Blood Debts is a murder mystery, a thirty-year-old cold case, so the actions of even the dead folks form part of the plot.
Well, it's a lot. I began by printing out the two pages of family trees for reference, and I advise you to do likewise. The plot takes a long time to get off the ground. The first half of the book, which constitutes part I of three, serves mainly to introduce all the players and their relationships. Part I is somehow simultaneously frenetic and slow. Your default assumption should be that, with certain important exceptions, everyone is feuding with everyone else. These feuds vary in intensity, from ordinary family arguments up to blood feuds. A lot of stuff happens in Part I, but it doesn't really go anywhere much.
Blood Debts has the familiar structure of a multiple first-person point of view novel, with each chapter told from the point of view of a single character. The majority of the chapters are told by brother and sister Clement and Cristina Trudeau, the scions of one of the prominent magical families of New Orleans. Their magic is of the generational (gen) magic tradition. Terry J. Benton-Walker tells us in the Acknowledgments that gen magic was inspired by Voodoo, but is not Voodoo. There is not much magic in Part I, nor do we make any real progress on the murder mystery.
The story kicks into gear in Part II, when we begin to make serious progress on the mystery and better understand the power struggles of the magical families. Even more than the book as a whole, Part II stars Clem and Cris. Clem has a love story, which was a bit much for my personal tastes. (Confession -- my intellectual maturation arrested at the age of seven, and I still eschew "the mushy stuff".) There was rather more of Clem and Yves making googly eyes at each other (not to mention engaging in activities involving body parts other than eyes) than I really needed. (If you are a mature adult human who enjoys descriptions of the behaviors of people in love, adjust your evaluation accordingly.) Cris's story was about magical mystery investigation and I enjoyed it more.
The big climactic scene, with the revelation of the mystery, occurs in chapter 41, less than half-way through Part III. We still have four more chapters and an epilog to go, but honestly, after chapter 41, it all felt like epilog. Overall, while I generally liked the parts of Blood Debts (with the exception of the syrupy Clem/Yves romance), I felt they weren't best arranged for maximum impact.
Blood Debts is Benton-Walker's debut novel. He has some lessons he wants to get across, and he does rather beat you over the head with them.