A review by tessisreading2
Whisper of Shadows by Diana Pharaoh Francis

3.0

Suddenly, Book 3 in the series, we’re being informed that religious zealots (led, of course, by some guy from Tennessee) have moral objections to magic. There’s not info-dumping too much information in early books and then there’s inventing totally new world-building three books into the series. Personally I would characterize this as the latter. We’re also informed that the FBI in fact tortures its detainees. It’s not that I’m interested in defending the FBI, but it feels like using an existing organization in an alternate reality is shorthand for “basically the same organization” (just like Francis’s references to Justin Bieber) and making the choice to adjust that to “wildly anti-magic to the point that they will torture detainees to get them to admit to magic use (?) while keeping that quiet” just feels sloppy, like Francis couldn’t be bothered to build up the concept of her evil anti-magic organization until she decided she needed one. Similarly, it falls to an FBI agent to explain how the criminal underworld works to Riley - despite the fact that Riley has thrown her loyalties in with a criminal leader whom she has now decided to consider family. It comes across as revisionism, since the only other explanation is that Riley is insanely stupid and ill-informed.

There are the usual infodumps (multiple pages about the history of Riley’s apartment building and interior design descriptions). Riley forms split-second assessments of people’s character and whether or not they’re evil based on looking at them and we’re supposed to assume she’s correct. It’s very unsubtle, and it makes it difficult to trust her judgment, particularly since she so often trusts people she shouldn’t (and then afterwards is like “wow, I shouldn’t have trusted them!”).

Complaints aside, the plot is moving at a good clip and Francis clearly has some sort of end goal in mind, so I'm continuing to read.