City of Smoke and Sea

Left in a coma for three weeks after a car accident, a recovering Queenie Rivers retreats to her grandmother’s house in Los Angeles to lick her wounds. Gran lands Queenie a job as waitress at a trendy restaurant on the coast. But there’s something wrong with its owner, Wyatt, and his associates Rita and Pirate. When Queenie comes home from walking her dog to find Gran dead on the floor, she reads Gran’s journals, which reveal a person she didn’t truly know. She learns that Gran was Romani and a Holocaust survivor, and that she, Wyatt, and other strange characters who’ve appeared suddenly aren’t what they seem: they—Queenie included—are a family of gods. As in Norse and Greek mythology, their collective efforts keep the world in balance. But now there’s a rift among them, and nature suffers as a result. The novel’s busy plot includes abduction, murder, a yard full of poisoned seabirds, human trafficking, illegal fracking, and dream- and time-travel as Queenie scours the past, searching for Gran’s killer. In the end, a too-facile resolution of the conflict among the warring gods mars the already muddy plot.