HEARTLAND, by Mark Teppo

Mark Teppo's quotes about HEARTLAND, the second novel in CODES OF SOULS:"The little mantra I hummed to myself while I was writing was: “Men and Mantras/Shotguns and Sigils.” I was going to write an urban fantasy book without vampires, lycanthropes, zombies, angels, or demons.

"Anyway, we kill a lot of our monsters every year in the fiction we read. By making them desirable, we defang them. We take away what is terrifying about them when we transform them into sex objects, as we convince ourselves that we are mastering our fear of the unknown. But are we?"

Desirable as the idea of a w-v free urban fantasy is, HEARTLAND is hard going.The main character, magus Michael Markham is a "Lightbreaker," who can take souls into his "Chorus," the internal voices which guide and confuse him. He's returning to Paris where he was nearly killed,and suddenly finds himself in the middle of a war where magi battles to become Hierarch, the top man of the mysterious organization. Michael accesses his tarot cards endlessly, but they give no helpful results.

These guys are apparently descendants of the Templars, and they may possibly be searching for the Holy Grail. Or not. It's sort of like THE DAVINCI CODE, with more deaths, only boring. The setup is interesting, but it goes nowhere. Markham is passive, takes no action on his own, and is pushed this way and that both by the Chorus, and his ex-and-future girlfriend, Marielle, who may be his enemy as well. Reading this in the same week as ANATHEM is very heavy going. I am going back to DEADER STILL, in the delightful Anton Strout series. This and the Gail Carriger "PARASOL PROTECTORATE " series are the antidote to this bloated story.