Trouble Walked In: Whitney Hill’s Elemental: Shadows of Otherside

Arden Finch has been eking out a fair living as a private investigator in the North Carolina’s Triangle. If she was looking into nice, normal citizens issues, she’d be doing just fine.

Start-ups had popped up like mushrooms after a rain in the Triangle—Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill—with North Carolina’s latest tax restructure. The influx of people from San Francisco and New York had brought money and big-city problems to a relatively smaller trio of towns. Business was booming, even if I turned down the illegal stuff. I could have made bank on cheating spouses alone. Elemental, Location 75

However, Arden is not looking into nice normal citizens and their issues. Instead, she’s dabbling with paranormal cases because despite appearances, she is not a human being. Born to one djinn parent and an unknown father, she’s a potent and dangerous type of paranormal called an elemental. While others draw magic from the aether, Arden has the power to control the air itself. She is an elemental, and this heritage is one she must hide because the ruling classes will kill her on sight. She’s tucked herself behind potent mystic shields and kept her abilities quiet.

So, when a blond comes walking into her office with a new job offer, she almost turns him away. Leith is an elf, one of the high born families, privileged out the whazoo. If he knew what she really was, he would do his damnedest to destroy her. But he doesn’t know, and the price he offers to search for a missing person is a little too much to resist. His grandmother is gone, leaving behind signs of a struggle and a bit of blood. He suspects she’s been kidnapped but refuses to go to the police for fear of some kind of unspecified scandal. He’s not above using magic to coerce Arden into helping, and though she can ignore such things, Arden plays along to avoid suspicion.

What follows is a curious investigation for a client who can’t be bothered to tell her everything, who is hard pressed to let her see the crime scene and its surroundings, and who takes umbrage with her methods yet still demands results. A headache to say the least. And working for this client only puts her in harm’s way, especially since her best friends—the genies Nebuchadnezzar (aka Duke) and Grimm—have been getting bad omens about the future and her role in it.

Still, her curiosity is stoked, even though it takes her into a club run by vampires and stumbling through a police investigation into an unnatural number of drownings in the local lakes. As she looks into the missing person’s case, Arden soon discovers a few more details about herself and her heritage, clues about her father, and the existence of others like herself.

As the danger level starts to rise, she is repeatedly encouraged to walk away from the case. However, by then she’s too personally invested to turn her back. How long will she be able to continue testing fate and dodging trouble? And what do the bad omens and rumors of rousing powers have to do with one missing elven grandmother?

Whitney Hill kicks off the Shadows of Otherside series of urban fantasy novels with a cleverly constructed yarn that draws on some of the cliches of hardboiled and noir fiction, recontextualizing them for the jaded reader, and then adds in doses of the supernatural for spice.

Arden starts out as a spin as the Sam Spade sort of detective. Instead of losing her partner and wanting revenge, its her own history that becomes the source of personal stakes. Some of the things she’s been taught come into question, leading her to question not only her own assumptions about her heritage but also those who adopted and raised her.

The first few chapters give us a chance to dip our toes in the world, get a sense of the various factions—there are elves, werewolves, vampires, and djinn, but there’s also a possible peacekeeping group called Watchers who report to an unknown entity of great power called Callista. All of this is useful information, and it comes alongside a plotline that seems unrelated (Arden is charged with gaining stealthy access to a startup company and planting bugs for the Watcher boss, Callista).

However, there’s a point where the narrative stops feeding us worldbuilding deets and introduces the blond homme fatale, thus letting the plot and characters move along on a mystery/suspense plot of their own. That’s when the book really grabs hold and gallivants off under its own steam and power.

In this universe, the paranormal forces are low key, hidden from the notice of the human world. As it turns out, the elves and other high born creatures have the ability to hush up reportage and overturn investigations (much as the wealthy do in most noir novels). Soon, however, this might come to an end if their existence is revealed to the mortal world—at that point the high born and the low will all come under scrutiny, and as Clive Barker pointed out decades ago in Cabal (aka Nightbreed), human beings would just as easily destroy those creatures it has dreamed about becoming as ally with them. Arden is ostensibly working for someone who wants to monitor paranormal activities and clean up dangerous revelations, but she’s not really invested in keeping things suppressed.

So, the world itself seems poised for a sudden and potentially lethal series of changes. The cataclysm is not due to world threatening monsters or supernatural powers, but from a zero hour shift in awareness. How will that all fall out and what will the world look like when it happens? We don’t get answers to that question yet. It’s something the series will explore.

The threat rumbles on the horizon, and though the book grapples with a seemingly inconsequential case in terms of the big picture, this missing person scenario proves more crucial than it might seem. Before Arden gets all the answers to that case, she will tie together several disparate plot threads, get job offers from powerful paranormals she can’t refuse, step out of her comfort zones and discover that there are no small plots for protagonists.

In addition to uncovering a man’s rights conspiracy among the matriarchal elves, the plotline here points the way to some damage control implementations with rather juicy ramifications—particularly for Arden who has been demanding freedom. She might get some measure of freedom from those treating her like a mushroom (that is, kept in the dark and fed a steady diet of shit), but at the cost of commitments to the wider, paranormal world of the Otherside she may not yet be ready to make.

This all adds to the fun for we readers, of course.

Whitney Hill tells this story in a conversational first person voice, giving us a good look at our protagonist’s inner workings as well as the worlds she walks through. Everything is strained through our narrator’s perspective and viewpoint, but we do not necessarily get the sense that Arden is compromised or unreliable. Instead, we get a sense of a clear headed individual who slowly comes to realize that the life she’s led has been built upon more than a few lies, who is not content to sit with those deceptions and yearns to find the truth. The world itself is therefore unreliable, and only through diligent investigation and leg work can she hope to make sense of it. As a protagonist, Arden is more than capable of this … despite her own insecurities telling her she might not be.

As well, there is real heart to the character. This is not some thriller protagonist who indulges in violence without once giving a thought to either personal safety or the cost of that violence. When she encounters a dead body, Arden is affected. Consider her response to a drowned victim she stumbles across during her investigation:

I stripped off my gloves, and scrambled down the slope in a crabwalk, scraping my bare hands in my hurry. The rock at the bottom was slippery with a treacherous mixture of lingering ice and splashing cold spray, and I had to grab a projecting tree root to stop from sliding onto my ass and straight into the water. Once I’d caught my balance, I looked around.

My eyes met the dull, glazed gaze of [the woman], dead at least a few days, wrapped in a heavy blanket, and dumped on the tiny suggestion of a beach created by a hollow under the cliff. The waves rocked her gently, threatening to tug the blanket free.

I gasped, going stiff with shock. The intuition that had nagged at me all day had been leading me here, and I’d nearly dismissed it, turned around, and gone home.

“Goddess,” I whispered, my chest tight. In all the missing persons cases I’d handled, I’d never found anyone dead. I nearly dropped my phone fumbling it out of my jacket pocket.

One bar of service. I hesitated, mind numb, staring dumbly at the screen. Who did I call? Elemental, Location 1766

This level of emotional honesty lends the book layers and depth that thrillers don’t necessarily provide. Arden is not a character who’s seen every rotten thing and can easily shrug off emotional weight. Even when she figures out who to call and gets back to her home, she needs time to fully grapple with what she discovered. She needs to process, to synthesize her experience before she can move forward and do what is necessary on her case. This encounter with a corpse is more than just a plot twist, it’s a big change dropped right into the protagonist’s lap and life.

As the novel progresses and contact with hard knock lessons come more often, Arden’s heart is hardened. She slowly becomes the hardboiled detective of yore, able to mete out violence when necessary. However, the author never loses sight of what made the character attractive in the first place.

When the book comes to its conclusion, the case that drove much of the plot is solved, but ramifications aplenty hang there waiting to be pulled into other stories. The series numbers eight books so far. The first five form one season of activity, the second three kick off another, and a three volume spinoff seems intended to add spicy situations, new characters, and new plot threads. Seems like a pretty involved world.

However, Elemental stands on its own quite nicely, but we catch glimpses of elements that will come to the fore, including more than a few hints of Ancient Ones rousing to activity after decades or centuries of dormancy. Arden will be taking center stage for much of what is to come.

Elemental is both a solid entry point for an urban fantasy thriller series and an engaging stand-alone read. Playing with the tropes of noir detective fiction and recontextualizing them for both a paranormal world and a strong female character lends them a fresh approach. I look forward to seeing where Hill takes this particular series.

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Elemental: Shadows of Otherside is available in eBook and paperback editions.

On Thursday, we will continue our series focusing on Stephen King’s Holly Gibney character with her first appearance in the first book of the Bill Hodges trilogy. Mr. Mercedes is available in eBook, hardcover, paperback, mass market paperback, and audiobook editions.

“Trouble Walked In: Whitney Hill’s Elemental: Shadows of Otherside” is copyright © 2023 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Quotes and cover image taken from the Benu Media eBook edition, released in 2020.

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