Dante King‘s Magent series (subtitle: NEW YORK SUPERNATURAL DIVISION) starts off quite a bit better than its description would have you believe. In the second novel though the protagonist catches a bad case of naivety and the government agency begins to reach painfully realistic levels of corruption and hypocrisy. That said, it still ends up… decent.
The third novel however spontaneously combusts around two-thirds of the way through with some of the most schizophrenic storytelling I’ve had the misfortune of reading lately: The protagonist goes on an emo bender about fearing power, gets convinced to power-up anyway, proceeds to get his ass kicked afterward by a random nobody mage, and then everybody gets teleported into a roundtable discussion and everything’s instantly resolved. It’s horrific.
I picked up M.J. Michaels‘ Faerie Bad Decisions, the first in a series of assorted stand-alone stories, on a whim. The description certainly sounded amusing enough and the book itself absolutely delivered on its promise; a sequence of deranged events that resulted in the protagonist ending up married in Vegas. It’s a lot of fun and the author seems to have a particular gift for mixing deadpan and absurdist humor.