“This is not the story you think it is. These are not the characters you think they are. This is not the book you are expecting.”

I’m going to be honest with you (When am I not?), a book description of this sort would normally put me off the thing entirely. But this is book is special, and I’ve been waiting a very long time for it. This is The Angel of the Crows, Katherine Addison’s follow up to 2014’s The Goblin Emperor, which not only was a cracking great read but also changed the way a great many fantasy aficionados, including myself, thought about the genre.

Yes, we all continue love sweeping epics, but Addison showed us that the minute details of a culture, the everyday dance of politics, the workings and machinations and gears and underpinnings of a world can be as fascinating, as steeped in lore, and as engaging as the greatest of magics. She showed us that successful character-driven fantasy wasn’t a fluke or a market fluctuation but rather a subgenre we both need and deserve.

So I ignored my natural inclination to blow raspberries and forged ahead.

And lo and behold, The Angel of the Crows was not the story I thought it was. The characters were absolutely not who I thought they were, and it was most definitely not the book I was expecting.

It was even better.

A pastiche of Sherlock Holmes yarn, Jack the Ripper fable, biblical tale, and horror story, The Angel of the Crows risked being more collage than coherent narrative. But in Addison’s hands, J.H. Doyle’s story (returning from war with the Fallen; meeting Crow, the Angel of London; forming a strange affinity that leads them to sharing a flat on Baker Street; forming an investigative partnership and friendship; battling the terrifying supernatural; and pursuing the West End’s most notorious serial killer) couldn’t go any other way.

After reading the novel, I learned that it started as fan fiction, and that makes perfect sense. The passion and time and care with which the pieces were assembled could be nothing but a labor of love. The same is true with the period style voice with which the book is crafted. In many cases, such efforts can seem forced or contrived, but in The Angel of the Crows, any other cadence would have played false.

It’s one of those very special books that shouldn’t work, but when executed is absolutely and completely perfect – likely because it started as a passion project and became one for publication only later.

As with The Goblin Emperor, Addison keeps the scale of the story small, focusing on the way history’s moments have affected individuals. Even when those individuals are celestial beings, our gaze is guided to their singular responses, the ways in which each personality absorbs and reflects the changes wrought by context and contact with other beings (the standing of a vampire hunt, for example, is no longer determined by physical prowess and body count but by financial status and property ownership). We learn of the ways various supernatural groups navigate London and relations with one another by watching representatives from various species interact under less-than-ideal circumstances. There are very few paragons here, just as there are very few among us.

The characters may not be who we expect, but this is their story. The larger context, the larger world, is an agent in it, but it never overwhelms them – it never subsumes their voices. I loved Doyle and Crow and Lestrade and Moriarty from the first moments I met them. and that adoration never wavered because Addison never allowed me to forget that they were allowing me to look into their lives and to participate in their stories.

And what are souls if not the sum of our stories?

The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison (Tor Books) releases on June 23.