“So you’re not going to go to law school? What do you want to do then?”
“… I wanna DANCE!”
- Dazed and Confused
Now, you might be wondering what the punch line from a 1993 teen comedy has to do with the first book in the latest urban fantasy series from New York Bestselling Author™ Seanan McGuire. It’s simple: all her protagonist, Verity Price, wants to do is be a professional ballroom dancer. Despite being raised as a cryptozoologist, trained in hundreds of ways to identify, capture, negotiate with, deal with, and even kill monsters, her true calling involves slinky dresses and the Argentine Tango. Under the cover identity of “Valerie Pryor,” she even had a respectable run on the reality show Dance or Die.
So here she is, a ballroom dancer who works as a cocktail waitress at Dave’s Fish and Strips in between competitions, handling New York’s cryptid “problems” whenever they rear their ugly (and not-so-ugly) heads. She’s having fun, so what could possibly go wrong? Hint: EVERYTHING.
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