Urban fantasy and crime go together like steak and potatoes. Each element compliments the other because urban fantasy has a great deal in common with crime novels. Both have dark sensibilities, sometimes leavened with dark humor. Both deal with very real issues of life and death, and question who you can believe and when. And then there are power issues: who has it and who abuses it. And like the best noir, urban fantasy stories often ask, “Where is the line between good and evil?” This list will get you started on your journey into gritty crime-themed fantasy. In many cases, you’re lucky. Several of these books are the first in a series, and if you like the first one, you automatically have a new whole library of stories to savor.
White Cat by Holly Black
Holly Black is a prolific and extremely creative fantasy author, known for her many adult and YA books. White Cat is the first in her Curse Workers trilogy. The crime in the series is based around a clever idea: that magic Workers have to touch their victims to perform their tasks. Some of the Workers can grant people luck, but others can kill with a touch. In White Cat, Cassel Sharpe is a young man in a family of Workers connected to the criminal world, though he believes he has no Worker talent. When he begins having visions of a white cat, however, he begins to see things differently and learns terrible things about both his family and himself.
Storm Front by Jim Butcher
This is book one of Butcher’s The Dresden Files. The star of the series is Harry Dresden, a wizard for hire who functions much like a PI in an old detective novel. Dresden works both his own cases and consults for the Chicago police department, and almost all of his cases lead to bigger trouble than he’d counted on. In Storm front, Dresden learns that he’s the prime suspect in a multiple murder investigation, which has strange connections to a missing magician he’s been hired to find.
London Falling by Paul Cornell
Book one in Cornell’s Shadow Police novels finds Detective Inspector James Quill trying to figure out how a drug dealer he arrested died in police custody. The more he looks, the stranger things get, as he gradually realizes that occult powers have been protecting the dealer. If he and his squad want to find the dealer’s killer—and stay alive—they’ll have to get deeper into the world of dark magic all around them.
Something From the Nightside by Simon R. Green
The Nightside in Green’s novels is “a square mile of Hell in the middle of the city,” a place where both magic and technology co-exist. The series follows detective John Taylor as he navigates both the Nightside and the ordinary world. In this first novel of the series, Taylor, who’s sworn never to return to the Nightside, takes a case looking for a lost girl and ends up right back where he never wanted to go again.
Dead Witch Walking by Kim Harrison
Book one in Harrison’s Hollows series, Dead Witch Walking deals with Rachel Morgan, a witch and investigator who polices magical creatures and humans who’ve broken the law. When Rachel tries to leave her job at Inderland Security, her boss puts out a contract on her. To keep her head on her shoulders, Morgan goes after Trent Talamack, a powerful business man and politician. If she can give Inderland the evidence to arrest Talamack, they just might let her live.
The City and The City by China Miéville
The City and The City is a police procedural novel with a difference. It takes place in two similar cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma, which occupy the same space at the same time. The story begins when a young woman’s body is discovered in a field in Beszel. The case seems routine enough, but when the police identify the woman, they discover that she’s connected to political upheaval tied to different groups who either want to destroy one of the cities or merge them into a single new city. Inspector Tyador Borlu crosses over to Ul Qoma to help with the investigation, but it leads to strange places, including a possible third city that exists in the spaces between the other two. Mieville is a powerful writer of extreme intelligence who takes the police procedural form and turns in on its head.
Half-Resurrection Blues by Daniel José Older
This the first of his Bone Street Rumba books. Carlos Delacruz is an agent for the New York Council of the Dead. He’s a rare breed, an inbetweener—a man partially resurrected from death. In this form, he works for the NYCOD, taking care of it when there are problems between the living and the dead. During an investigation, he discovers another inbetweener—a sorcerer who plans on opening the Underworld. The story is about Delacruz’s investigation, but also about what he discovers about himself and the human life he once had.
The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross
The Atrocity Archives is the first book of Stross’s wildly inventive Laundry Files series. These aren’t really crime novels, but more like mathematical-magical/horror-political James Bond stories. The Laundry is a secret British organization that polices not just the usual magic and monsters of ordinary urban fantasy, but the hidden Lovecraftian horrors that live in the deepest recesses of the universe. Plus, there’s a lot of paperwork and meetings. And the pay isn’t that good. I’m not even going to try and recount the plot because doing it to any of Stross’s books is pointless. They explode in too many directions, bringing everything from old Nazi occultists to governmental regulations to the deep and horrid mathematics that links all the horrors of the universe together. What I will say is that if you like your James Bonds unglamorous, your horrors horrible, and your terror mixed with dark humor, you’ll love The Atrocity Archives and the other the Laundry Files books.
