This month’s Bananapants! prompt kinda stumped me because I don’t generally go for the all-out-bonkers-crazy in books, so I decided to look for something that might qualify as being ‘unusual’ instead. I’ve been meaning to read something by Lyn Gala for some time, and when I read the synopsis for Deductions, book one in the Aberrant Magic series, it seemed like its setting of an AU world in which magic exists would be a good fit.

While the existence of magic – or Talent – is known in this world, those with magical abilities are still fairly rare, and there’s a lot of discrimination and mistrust between them and the ‘mundanes’. Magic-users range from powerful shamans – whose magic generally emerges through a near-death experience which unites them with their spirit guide – to adepts – whose powers are weak but who work with shamans to help keep them tethered to the physical plane when they are in the spirit world – and all the others in between, who focus their magic through crystals or spells.

Darren Oberton is the sole mundane on the FBI’s top Talent team – one of several tasked with investigating crimes involving magic-users. He’s been with this particular team for around six years and even though he’s on good terms with his colleagues, he still feels like an outsider on occasion because even after all that time, there are still things about magic they don’t share with him. The recent addition of a new adept, brought in to work alongside their boss, Kavon Boucher, one of the most powerful shamans in the world, has upset the team dynamic considerably, however, leaving Darren feeling like even more the odd man out. Ben Anderson is a sneaky little shit who takes pleasure in needling Darren whenever he can, yet no-one else on the team ever notices what he’s doing. Worse, he’s picked up on Darren’s crush on their boss and takes every opportunity to gloat when Kavon turns to him for help and not Darren. Darren tries not to let the other man’s behaviour get to him, but… it’s getting to him. In his first year or two on the team, Darren felt that maybe his interest in Kavon might be reciprocated – until Kavon suddenly shut everything down and pulled away from him. Darren knows that for a mundane to be romantically involved with a shaman is dangerous (for the mundane) but surely they could have been friends, if they couldn’t be anything more? But Kavon is cold to the point of freezing with him most of the time, and Darren really could do without Anderson’s continual sneering.

Darren and the team are currently investigating the disappearance of three young adepts who come from families associated with fundamentalist churches that regularly speak out against magic, calling it the work of the devil and just about stopping short of calling for witches to be burned at the stake. Kavon, Darren and Ben travel to one of these, Kavon intending to conduct a search on the spirit plane to see if he can find out if whoever has taken the adepts has somehow been able to conceal their crimes by shifting the magical energy to another plane. Before he can get started however, he realises something unusual is going on in the living world – and emerges from the spirit plane to find Darren holding Anderson down on the bonnet of the car, yelling and accusing him of using his magic against him, while a powerful magical storm rages around them. Which makes no sense. There’s no way an adept could conjure up such a thing, and Darren is a mundane – yet he’s somehow unleashed some devastatingly strong, shamanic magic. Kavon doesn’t understand it and neither does Darren – and things become even more confusing when it becomes apparent that Darren is able to do things that not even the most powerful shaman should be able to do.

Deductions has some good bones in terms of its story, but it falls down badly in the execution. The incorporation of the shamanic ideas of magic, the significance of the spirit guides and the magical planes is quite different to any fantasy I’ve read before, and the plot is interesting, but the characters are pretty two-dimensional and the romantic relationship between Kavon and Darren lacks both chemistry and depth. We’re told that they were moving towards friendship when Darren first joined the team and that Kavon just backed off and now treats Darren quite coldly, but we never see that initial closeness or fondness and we never see them on the verge of more than friendship. The author tries to show readers, in Kavon’s PoV, that he’s attracted to Darren and has ruthlessly suppressed it for both their sakes, but I just couldn’t buy that there was ever any emotional connection between them. There’s just nothing there at all, other than ‘oh, hey, I’m a shaman now, so we can bang’ and the sex scenes are perfunctory.

Although I liked the concept behind the story, the magic systems are a bit confusing and I had to re-read some passages to try to work out what was actually going on. This is the first book in a series, so I suppose it’s to be expected that there’s a lot of exposition and information thrown out, but ultimately, there’s too much of that at the expense of the characters and relationships, which lack depth and authenticity. The supporting cast is little more than window-dressing, and the whole thing feels very superficial. Reviews for other books in the series indicate similar problems, so I don’t think I’ll be continuing with it. It’s rare that I’m disappointed in a book I pick for the TBR Challenge, but this was one of those times.