I've been waiting for this book for quite a while. It's the eleventh in Seanan McGuire's 'InCryptid' series, though her acknowledgements at the end point out that it was the story she used to pitch the whole thing to begin with. It's also the first of them to place Alice Price-Healy in the lead role. She's the grandmother of most of the series leads thus far—Verity, Alex, Annie, not Sarah—but it has to be pointed out that she looks as young as or younger than all of them, because of how she's been wandering dimensions for over half a century in search of her husband, Thomas Price, stolen away by the crossroads.

If we've forgotten the details there, this starts out with a recap that fleshes out what we already knew considerably. In case that isn't enough, the bonus novella, 'And Sweep Up the Wood' covers part of that in even more depth, so it wouldn't be a terrible idea to actually read that before the actual novel. Thomas Price was a member of the Covenant of St. George but a secret sorcerer, who was sent by them to spy on the Healy family in Buckley Township, Michigan. Instead he connected with them, especially Alice, and makes a deal with the crossroads for her life after she's bitten by a cryptid. After five years of marriage, the crossroads comes for him and she's been searching for him ever since, never believing that he was dead.

With that refresher out of the way and some quick recovery from her latest dimensional damage, we join Alice as she sets back out to find Thomas. Given that she's the lead at last, we have to feel a good possibility that she'll finally track him down, but another reason why now may well be the time is that Annie killed the crossroads. If that was keeping her from Thomas, it isn't doing it now and that ought to make the job a little easier. As we gradually learn, that's not a bad assumption but it isn't remotely that simple and there have been other things keeping her from going in the right directions.

What really changes things is a journey back to Helos, the dimension where she was damaged this last time, to retrieve her pack and finish the job she was doing at the time for the fifty-foot lamia Naga. He's a professor of extra-dimensional studies at the University of K'larth in the dimension of Empusa and he's been helping Alice for decades, not least by skinning her alive every once in a while, growing her a fresh skin and then having her tattooed afresh with single use spells that are invaluable on her quest. He also has her do bounty hunter work while she's at it.

Anyway, back in Helos, she figures out that her pack must be in a particular cave, so she heads in, defeats a giant crayfish in battle and gets stuff from its hoard. It's a 'Dungeons & Dragons' scene, but a crucial one. There's her pack. There are the ones she was hired to retrieve. And over there is an old leather map roll and some antique books. She grabs them all. And, back on Empusa, she has the time to look at them and realise that she's made a breakthrough. These are the Lost Journals of Aikanis, a legendary dimensional explorer and she has new directions to take at last.

It could be argued that this is rather convenient, but there are a few arguments against that. For one, if it's convenient, it's also half a century later than it could have been. That's not trivial. For another, it shouldn't have been needed at all, if only a bunch of other plot details I'm not going to tell you about weren't there. What's more, Alice is a Healy and luck is an actual thing in the Healy family, for reasons. Frankly, I didn't have a problem with this apparent convenience at all.

I also didn't have much of a problem with the convenience that, when Alice finally finds Thomas—and while that would have been a spoiler in any earlier book, it really ought to be taken as a given from the very beginning of this one—he appears to be as young as she is. Sure, he's a sorcerer, but even he has a few concerns: "It seems a little too convenient to be believable." It is, but it's also a necessary evil for this story to work. Had both of them aged properly, everything else here would have tumbled down like a house of cards.

The only convenience that seems like a potential stretch to me is the one that ties Thomas's right hand woman in the Palace of the Autarch to the wider series. I'm not going to suggest that I won't like Sally Henderson joining the expansive Healy-Price-Baker family that constitutes our primary series cast, because she's going to be fun, but there are multiple connections between here and a number of existing cast members and that might take more than a little explaining away. It helps quite a lot that McGuire has been setting this revelation up for a few books now, going back past the two Sarah Zellaby novels to Annie's books.

However much we accept (or don't) the concept of Healy family luck, McGuire built plenty into the logistics of dimensional travel here, going far beyond what we learned in the previous two books, in which Sarah uses her cuckoo blood to rip a hole between dimensions and drop a chunk of Ames, Iowa into another one. Alice uses technique and technology rather than brute force mathematics and I'd say that there's more substance from a series standpoint within the first hundred pages of this book than the entirety of 'Calculated Risks'. In fact, there's enough, that I started to wonder about doors. This isn't the 'Wayward Children' series, but could it connect through infrastructure? There are definitely similarities.

Now that she feels that she's finally made the right breakthrough, Alice is unstoppable. She gets another fresh skin, another set of tailored spell tattoos and, this time, a set of beads to help her not merely get to the bottle world she's aiming at but get back again and with Thomas, to boot. It sits deep in the topology of dimensions and you won't be too shocked to discover that her guess is a good one. There's Thomas at last, a hundred and fifty pages in, and, in many ways, the story can begin at that point. After all, a bottle world is one that you can get into but not out of, so reunion doesn't mean escape. There's a lot more still to do but they can at least do it together, even if it's against a serious deadline.

I talked in my 'Calculated Risks' review of how McGuire was stretching genres. 'InCryptid' is urban fantasy, without a doubt, given that it's set in our recognisable world but with apparently no end of cryptids hiding both in plain sight and in special places—the Galway Woods behind Thomas and Alice's house in Buckley Township are the only place you can find tailypo and frickens—but, at this point, we seem to spending a lot less time in that recognisable world of ours. I started to wonder about where the boundaries of urban fantasy were.

After all, we don't really visit a city in this book or anywhere else that feels urban. The closest we get might be Naga's place on Empusa or the Palace of the Autarch on Lemure. Many characters in this book would clearly count as cryptids in our world, but that's not where we meet them. Alice's friends Helen and Phoebe are satyrs, but they live on Ithaca, where that's entirely normal. There are musings here that our cryptids may just be visitors from other dimensions, which feels like it's turning fantasy into something closer to science fiction. However, the tone remains fantasy, even if 'Calculated Risks' morphs from survival horror into planetary romance and 'Spelunking Through Hell' plays with heroic fantasy in its second half.

Whatever it is, I had an absolute blast with this book. I'm getting old enough that new books with teenagers as leads start to feel like they're visiting exotic lands, even though I live there. I like to read about older leads and Alice and Thomas are absolutely that here, even if they don't look it. I believe the main story here is set in 2021 and Alice was born in 1938, making her eighty-three, and she married an older man, Thomas being ninety-two. They have young bodies but old minds, both sides of that equation playing important parts here. I appreciated their wisdom and dedication as much as their flexibility and prowess in battle.

As much as I spent the first few books in the series waiting for Annie to take the helm and was not disappointed when she did, I like Alice as a lead as much as Annie. And, as much as I dig Alex's cool career working with animals both traditional and cryptid, I have to say I dig Alice's kinda-sorta job as an interdimensional bounty hunter even more. Frankly, the bounty hunter part is great to see but I'd take a job in interdimensional exploration without hesitation. I'd love to tackle the weird logistics needed in effective mapmaking across dimensional boundaries. Aikanis may be a legend, but it seems like his cartography needed some work.

Up next appears to be a big one. The title 'Backpacking Through Bedlam' suggests that it counts as a pair with this one, but the elevator pitch suggests that it's a lot more than that. It looks like we're finally going to dive into war between the Price family and the Covenant of St. George, set up as long ago as the finalé to book five, 'Chaos Choreography'. While we might have imagined it back then, everything that happened in Annie's books, Sarah's books and now Alice's first book do put a very different spin on how that might play out. I'm eager to dive in next month. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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