Free Agent

June 23, 2014
Marissa Locks goes into magical debt slavery to save her sister’s life, becoming an agent for a powerful fairy named Grimm, who appears through mirrors and other reflective objects. Her normal work includes chasing down thieves of magic objects, rescuing human children from wolves, and setting up princes to fall in love with well-paying princesses. Then she falls in love with one of her targets and angers an evil fairy godmother, a prince disappears, and the superpowerful fae prepare to go to war with humans. Marissa hopes only to stay alive, ideally keeping her soul and sanity. Her own happy ending seems impossibly out of reach. What begins as a deceptively cutesy urban fantasy soon ups the ante with the gathering darkness and sharp details of the ongoing price of magical servitude. This is a fireball of a start to Nelson’s Grimm Agency series.

July 1, 2014

Even fairy godmothers need help to get things done. Marissa is working off the debt incurred by her family when fairy godfather Grimm hired her in exchange for a cure for her sick younger sister. She runs errands and occasionally kills things for Grimm, but when one of her usual jobs acting as matchmaker for a royal prince and princess backfires, Marissa has to make it right. VERDICT Combining urban fantasy and fairy tales is such a clever premise for a new urban fantasy series that it's actually painful this one is not better executed. The worldbuilding is sketched in, and author Nelson is reaching too hard for jokes that never quite land.

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