The Brightest Fell

New York Times -bestselling October Daye series • Hugo Award-winning author Seanan McGuire • "Top of my urban-paranormal series list!" --Felicia Day Things are slow, and October “Toby” Daye couldn’t be happier about that. The elf-shot cure has been approved, Arden Windermere is settling into her position as Queen in the Mists, and Toby doesn’t have anything demanding her attention except for wedding planning and spending time with her family. Maybe she should have realized that it was too good to last. When Toby’s mother, Amandine, appears on her doorstep with a demand for help, refusing her seems like the right thing to do…until Amandine starts taking hostages, and everything changes. Now Toby doesn’t have a choice about whether or not she does as her mother asks. Not with Jazz and Tybalt’s lives hanging in the balance. But who could possibly help her find a pureblood she’s never met, one who’s been missing for over a hundred years? Enter Simon Torquill, elf-shot enemy turned awakened, uneasy ally. Together, the two of them must try to solve one of the greatest mysteries in the Mists: what happened to Amandine’s oldest daughter, August, who disappeared in 1906. This is one missing person case Toby can’t afford to get wrong.

Praise for the October Daye series:

"The top of my urban-paranormal series list! I am so invested in the worldbuilding and the characters.... The romance is real and awesome, but doesn't overshadow the adventure." —Felicia Day

"I can't believe McGuire can come up with another adventure as riveting as this one. But then I say that after every book in this series." —SFRevu

"McGuire has never lacked for courage in her writing.... The phenomenally inventive October Daye series showcases her narrative daring and ingenuity beautifully." —RT Reviews

"Prepare to be dazzled.... Like the best of urban fantasy, with each reveal and mystery solved, Toby's world grows ever more enticing. As seductive as faerie itself, this is one series I could never give up." —All Things Urban Fantasy

"These books are like watching half a season of your favorite television series all at once.... More than anything else, it's the fun of it all that's kept me returning to McGuire's books and to this series." —SF Signal 

"The plot is strong, the characterization is terrific, the tragedies hurt...and McGuire's usual beautiful writing and dark humor are present and accounted for. This has become one of my favorite urban fantasy series." —Fantasy Literature

"With Ashes of Honor, McGuire has crafted a deeply personal and intense story that will keep you on the edge, hoping to be pushed over. In my opinion, it is, hands down, the best Toby to date." —The Ranting Dragon

"An urban fantasy detective series featuring a resourceful female detective.... [October Daye] should appeal to fans of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files as well as the novels of Charlaine Harris, Patricia Briggs, and similar authors." —Library Journal

Auteur

Seanan McGuire

Résumé
New York Times-bestselling October Daye series • Hugo Award-winning author Seanan McGuire • "Top of my urban-paranormal series list!" —Felicia Day

Things are slow, and October “Toby” Daye couldn’t be happier about that.  The elf-shot cure has been approved, Arden Windermere is settling into her position as Queen in the Mists, and Toby doesn’t have anything demanding her attention except for wedding planning and spending time with her family.

Maybe she should have realized that it was too good to last.
               
When Toby’s mother, Amandine, appears on her doorstep with a demand for help, refusing her seems like the right thing to do…until Amandine starts taking hostages, and everything changes.  Now Toby doesn’t have a choice about whether or not she does as her mother asks.  Not with Jazz and Tybalt’s lives hanging in the balance.  But who could possibly help her find a pureblood she’s never met, one who’s been missing for over a hundred years?
               
Enter Simon Torquill, elf-shot enemy turned awakened, uneasy ally.  Together, the two of them must try to solve one of the greatest mysteries in the Mists: what happened to Amandine’s oldest daughter, August, who disappeared in 1906.
               
This is one missing person case Toby can’t afford to get wrong.

Échantillon de lecture
One

October 9th, 2013

• Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.
  —William Shakespeare, *Macbeth.

THE FETCH IS ONE of the most feared and least understood figures in Faerie. Their appearance heralds the approach of ines­capable death: once the Fetch shows up, there’s nothing that can be done. The mechanism that summons them has never been found, and they’ve always been rare, with only five conclusively identified in the last century. They appear for the supposedly sig­nificant—kings and queens, heroes and villains—and they wear the faces of the people they have come to escort into whatever awaits the fae beyond the borders of death. They are temporary, transitory, and terrifying.
 
My Fetch, who voluntarily goes by “May Daye,” because noth­ing says “I am a serious and terrible death omen” like having a pun for a name, showed up more than three years ago. She was sup­posed to foretell my impending doom. Instead, all she managed to foretell was me getting a new roommate. Life can be funny that way.
 
At the moment, doom might have been a nice change. May was standing on the stage of The Mint, San Francisco’s finest karaoke bar, enthusiastically bellowing her way through an off-key rendi­tion of Melissa Etheridge’s “Come to My Window.” Her live-in girlfriend, Jazz, was sitting at one of the tables closest to the stage, chin propped in her hands, gazing at May with love and adoration all out of proportion to the quality of my Fetch’s singing.
 
May has the face I wore when she appeared. We don’t look much alike anymore, but when she first showed up at my apart­ment door to tell me I was going to die, we were identical. She has my memories up to the point of her creation: years upon years of parental issues, crushing insecurity, abandonment, and criminal activities. And right now, none of that mattered half as much as the fact that she also had my absolute inability to carry a tune.
 
“Why are we having my bachelorette party at a karaoke bar again?” I asked, speaking around the mouth of the beer bottle I was trying to keep constantly against my lips. If I was drinking, I wasn’t singing. If I wasn’t singing, all these people might still be my friends in the morning.
 
Of course, with as much as most of them had already had to drink, they probably wouldn’t notice if I did sing. Or if I decided to sneak out of the bar, go home, change into my sweatpants, and watch old movies on the couch until I passed out. Which would have been my preference for how my bachelorette party was going to go, if I absolutely had to have one. I didn’t think they were re­quired. May had disagreed with me. Vehemently. And okay, that had sort of been expected.
 
What I hadn’t expecte…