Oh, and there are spoilers in this review, mostly for the first third of the book.

Rosemary And Rue is the first book in the October Daye series, about a half-fairy, half-human detective who solves crimes at the intersection between the magic and mundane. At least, that's what happens in this first book, which involves shape shifters, sea witches, the king of cats, and a gun that shoots iron bullets (which are deadly to fairies.) McGuire's version of San Francisco, with fairie kingdoms hidden all over the Bay area and pixies hiding in Golden Gate Park, is genuinely enchanting, especially when she's bringing out the downsides of magic being everywhere. At one point, our hero, October, visits the court of the Faerie Queen, who transforms her T-shirt and jeans into a ballgown — and then doesn't change them back, forcing October to slog through mud and crime scenes wearing an impractical gown that gets increasingly muddy.

We were talking about noir fantasy a while back, and Rosemary And Rue isn't really that noir — it's more like classic urban fantasy with a murder mystery. It's not quite paranoid, dark or morally gray enough to be noir, and McGuire's characters are mostly fundamentally nice, with a few nasty quirks here and there.

Rosemary And Rue starts out with a bang, one of the best openings to a novel I've read in ages: October "Toby" Daye is working as a private detective on a case for her lead, Sylvester Torquill, whose wife and daughter have been kidnapped. Toby is tailing a suspect, Sylvester's brother Simon, and she calls her human husband and mostly human daughter to let them know she'll be late coming home. And then she follows Simon into a trap — with help from a sinister ally, he turns October into a fish, and traps her in the koi pond in Golden Gate Park's Japanese Tea Garden. She stays there for the next fourteen years, until the spell finally wears off and she changes back.

Toby's husband and daughter want nothing to do with her because they think she abandoned them. And she's ashamed of her failure, so she can't go back to her friends in Faerie. Instead, she takes a job on the graveyard shift at the Safeway (when her magic can conceal her fairy features most easily) and keeps to herself. Until one of her closest friends in Faerie gets murdered and puts a binding on October — either she finds out who the killer was and brings them to justice, or she'll die too. Solving the murder, of course, means returning to the world of the fae, which is full of dark corners and deadly surprises.

The great strength of Rosemary And Rue is in its worldbuilding: Faerie San Francisco feels like a real city, and it's not hard to imagine that mythical creatures and magical glamours lurk in every alley in SOMA and behind every tree in Golden Gate Park, and super-powerful mystical forces are living in rent-controlled apartments in the Tenderloin. Every relationship in Faerie turns out to be fraught with obligations — everybody owes debts to each other, which are viewed as the worst kinds of encumbrances, and there's a taboo on saying "thank you," lest you inadvertently take on another constricting debt.

The other great thing about Rosemary And Rue is that October is a great fantasy heroine, from her contentious relationship with her cats to her many tormented Loves That Can Never Be. She's caught between her fairie and human heritage, and can never really be at home in either culture. Plus — and this is the closest the novel comes to being noir-tinged — half-blooded fairy hybrids, like October, face discrimination and mistreatment at the hands of a magical world that views them as inferior, or even worse, as a abominations. The novel is full of these cast-off, mistreated and misbegotten "changelings," and October is the biggest underdog of them all — despite having been knighted for past gallantry, that we only dimly hear about.

After exploring McGuire's fairy city for one dark murder mystery, I'm on board for more, and looking forward to seeing how October's tangled web of allegiances and obligations plays out over the course of the next few books.

Now for the bad news: Rosemary And Rue has a couple of serious flaws, on top of occasionally cheesy writing. First of all, it works much better as an urban fantasy tale than as a murder mystery: October is a terrible detective, who mostly stumbles around making a target of herself until the bad guys finally take a shot at her. She doesn't do all that great a job of collecting leads, frequently ignores the most obvious line of investigation, and needs others to point out the obvious to her. And there's really only ever one suspect in the murder who makes sense, so it's not much of a shock when it turns out to be that person.

And the other major problem is that McGuire tries so hard to make Rosemary the first book in a series, it falls a bit flat at times as a stand-alone novel. The book has an enormous, sprawling supporting cast, and October has a lengthy, involved backstory with every single one of them. There were a few moments where I thought I must have missed a page, because the narrator starts talking about a character whom she's got a history with — and then I realized the book hadn't mentioned this character before. Long after you think you've met all of October's old frenemies, the book keeps bringing in new characters who aren't new to October. And this usually means the story has to grind to a halt for a few pages, while October spoonfeeds us more stuff that happened before the book began. At times, this feels like the tenth book in a series, rather than the first. There are almost no characters in the book whom October doesn't already know.

Despite both of those issues — which feel a bit like "first novel" pains — I'm still a huge fan of the universe McGuire has created, and eager to become more acquainted with her city of fairies, rose goblins and kelpies.

McGuire, who also draws a webcomic and has recorded three albums of music, is publishing the Feed trilogy under the pen name Mira Grant. She already has her first novel, Rosemary And Rue, coming out this fall. When we heard that McGuire had sold a trilogy about zombies, blogging and politics (at auction, which usually means the publishers were fighting over it) we had to know more. So we asked her to tell us more about her novel's storyline, and here's what she said:

The zombies rose in the summer of 2006, following the accidental combination of two genetically-engineered viruses: Marburg Amberlee, designed by a team working in Denver, Colorado as a cure for cancer, and the "Kellis flu," a rhinovirus intended to serve as a sort of block against the common cold. When these viruses met up, they formed Kellis-Amberlee, a hybrid airborne filovirus that spread around the globe in a matter of weeks. Shortly after that, people who were believed dead started getting back up and attacking.

The mainstream media was, of course, not entirely willing to go "hey, look, zombies." They came up with lots of stories, but none of them were really capable of taking that final step into George Romero territory. The Internet media had no such qualms. Almost immediately, the world blogging community was documenting attacks, sharing information, and delving into the horror community's full supply of zombie lore, looking for the answer to survival. They got a lot of things wrong. They got a lot of things right. The fact that we survived the Rising — the three-month period from July through September, 2006, where over thirty percent of the world's population died — is largely credited to the blogging community. And George Romero, whose accidental education in the ways of the living dead is viewed as a key part of saving the world.

The final entries made by every blogger who died during the Rising, and in the years that followed, were preserved in an online archive called "The Wall," a permanent virtual memorial to what the Internet did for mankind.

FEED takes place more than twenty years after the Rising. Most of humanity stays inside whenever possible, avoiding large groups, open spaces, and anything that might put them at risk. Blood tests have taken the place of handshakes. The most popular name in the country is "George." Almost all technical funding goes into medical research, looking for a cure to Kellis-Amberlee, and almost no one has any faith in the "traditional" news media; people are still too aware of how they failed us during the summer of 2006. The blogging community has split into three major branches: the Newsies, who do factual reporting and register their biases openly with neutral reporting sites; the Irwins, who play daredevil in a world that most people would rather avoid; and the Fictionals, who provide escapism, humor, and all the free porn you could want. The sub-divisions are infinite, but almost all bloggers identify as one major branch or another.

The first volume of the trilogy deals with the presidential campaign of Senator Peter Ryman, who has invited a set of bloggers from the San Francisco Bay Area to accompany and document the race. Georgia Mason, her brother Shaun, and their friend Georgette "Buffy" Meissonier were lucky enough to land the position, and hence, potentially, the scoop of their lives. Assuming they can get out still breathing.

FEED is a book about politics, corruption, presidential campaigns, journalism, integrity, escapism, the traditional news media, and how Livejournal saved the world from the living dead. It's about reporters, writers, idiots who like to poke dangerous things with sticks, the things that keep them together, and the things that tear them apart.

It's also about, well, zombies. Lots of zombies. What happens to a society when it has to live with the constant threat of zombies. What that does to the entertainment industry. To social patterns. To clothing styles. To the way that people interact. To funeral rites. Basically, it's an unholy cross between TRANSMETROPOLITAN and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, with a little FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS on the side.

"Alive or dead, the truth won't rest. Rise up while you can." — from Images May Disturb You, the blog of Georgia Mason.

Zombie and computer image by Erik J. Gustavson on Flickr.