Reliquary by Sarah Fine

One thing I look forward to when a new book by a new author comes out is the possibility of a new magic system to explore.  In Reliquary by Sarah Fine, we get introduced to one of the more unique systems of magic.  Some are practitioners and some are merely sensitives

This is a story brought to us through the eyes of our main character, Mattie Carver.  She's a young lady who has her life planned to perfection and we all know what happens to well laid plans.  As her plans start go awry, we get to learn more about Mattie, her fiancé Ben and his brother Asa.  These are the characters we get to learn the most about as the adventure unfolds.  There is a lot of self realization for Mattie as she navigates the underworld of magic and tries to learn its rules.  When it comes to her fiancé and his brother and even some of her family members, Mattie is more adept at finding questions rather than answers.

The story itself has a decent flow.  It does suffer from pacing in some spots.  Part of that comes from the action scenes.  The narrative for many of the action scenes are overly verbose.  In an effort to get the details of the scene, we lose the  tempo of the struggles in depth of the description.  Unfortunately, some of the spots where a bit of detail would be welcome wind up a bit thin.

Reliquary by Sarah Fine is a urban fantasy that reads like an adventure/romance novel.  It explores not only the discovery of magic in a mundane world but, the beginning of the adventure of Mattie's self discovery.  This book has much violence (though not gratuitous) very frank discussions of sex and sexuality as well as some grown up language.  This is a definite R rated.