Baba Yaga, going by the name Barbara Yager, is called to a small town where children have been disappearing. There she meets the frustrated sheriff who has been searching for five months and still doesn’t have a clue. However, he does have washboard abs and a strong muscular chest even though he spends most of his time sitting behind a desk or eating burgers and pie at the local greasy spoon.
It turns out that the children are being abducted by an evil rusalka, upset by fracking and taking her revenge on the human community. But when the rusalka’s activity also threatens to destroy the fairy kingdom the queen of the fairies charges Baba with solving the problem, because when the fabric of fairy is literally dissolving around you it only makes sense that instead of mustering all your forces and sending your high power knights and magic wielders out to fix it you would instead send your lone human witch and her studly sheriff “friend.”
Turns out “Baba Yaga” is a title, not a name, and there are three of them in the U.S.
I think we can reliably predict that there will be two more books in this series.
I should just stop reading books with covers like this, but every once in a while I’m surprised by something really good. (This wasn’t one of those times.)
[edit]
I have been wasting more time than this story deserves stewing over it, so I’m going to add some spoilers and vent about the part of this story that pisses me off the most.
How, you may ask, did the rusalka get there in the first place? It turns out that this is the fault of the sheriff’s estranged wife. The rusalka, as I’ve mentioned, was pissed off by the fracking, but it’s important to understand that no fracking had actually taken place. There was a proposal before that town to allow fracking in the next election, and there was considerable discussion. On the one hand, this would bring badly needed revenue into the farming community, on the other, fracking would pollute their ground water, destroy their crops and sicken and/or kill them all. So it was a tough decision, but it hadn’t been made yet.
Six or so years previously the sheriff and his wife had lost their infant daughter to SIDS. This completely devastated the wife, who began drinking and taking drugs to deal with the pain, and soon began sleeping with all the men in the town. Because men are completely defenseless in the face of a drunken, high and vulnerable woman, as we all know, this was clearly entirely and solely her fault. Everyone felt very sorry for the sheriff.
Having victimized all the men in town, the whore had to start going further afield. One day, while wandering through a distant forest (as one does when one is drunk, high and looking for men to seduce), she stumbled across a hidden cave and decided to search it. After stumbling through the dark of the narrow, twisting, branching passages she found a doorway into fairy that had been created by the stresses on the natural environment caused by the fracking that would be proposed some years later.
When she entered fairy she encountered the rusalka, who was incensed at the soon to be proposed pollution and offered to steal the wife a new baby daughter if the wife would show her the doorway, so that she could wreak anticipatory revenge on the town.
Why would anyone write this misogynistic and illogical drivel?
Ok, maybe I can get some sleep now.