Critical Point is the third in a series. You should read the series! My reviews of the first two books in it can be found here and here.
Should someone make a Cas Russell TV series, y/y? Critical Point is the third book in the series and all I can think, besides “this is so fucking fun,” is “this would make a great CW procedural.” (Relatedly, I have started watching a very stupid CW procedural, Lucifer, which is very stupid. I have chosen not to fact-check whether it actually airs on the CW because of how indisputably it is in spirit a CW show.) Cas Russell is a low-level career criminal turned…. still kind of a career criminal? but with a team and a conscience (sort of). In a former life, she was modified in a lab by a creepy company called Pithica to be a peerless math genius, which it turns out is kind of a superpower. She uses it to do crimes and, sometimes, help people.
Critical Point begins with a teenage girl arriving at Cas’s office to ask Cas to help find her father, who hasn’t answered his text messages in a few days. Cas is ready to dismiss her until the girl tells her who her father is: Arthur Tresting. Then, while Cas is freaking out about a, her close friend and colleague going missing and b, her close friend and colleague having a secret family he didn’t tell her about, someone blows up her office. That someone appears to be an Australian named Oscar who Cas forgets about every time he’s not directly in her line of sight. It’s a real one-two punch of an opener!
I love Cas’s team, so it should be no surprise to anyone that I was delighted with the way Critical Point delves into the lives and histories of her team. Not only does Arthur have a daughter, he has actually five kids (all of them sweet, devoted, smart, and angry) and an ex-husband who is Through with This Bullshit. Not only does Arthur have five kids and an ex-husband, but Checker and Pilar knew about them. Not only does Arthur have five kids and an ex-husband that Checker and Pilar knew about, but Checker is kind of part of the family — Arthur and Diego took him in when he was screwed up and wretched and helped to set him on the straight and narrow path. So pretty much everyone knew about the secret family except for Cas.
I loved this. I loved it. Throughout the book Cas is struggling to come to terms with the knowledge that the people she has come to trust the most do not trust her that same amount. Even harder to come to terms with is the fact that they’re right. Her life is chaos, and they have chosen to keep that chaos at a distance from the ones it’s their job to protect. Yet even while knowing that Arthur considers her mad (sometimes), bad (grey area really), and dangerous to know (FAIR PLAY THERE), she continues to put everything on the line to get him back. It’s heartbreaking in the best way. My one wish was that the book had ended on a slightly more hopeful note vis-a-vis Cas’s relationship with her team. I want them to get past this. Maybe in book 4 Tabitha can become Cas’s apprentice?
(“Jenny, are your desires in this matter influenced by how much you enjoy the munchkin in Lucifer being so high on Lucifer?” Yes.)
As always in a series where one of the characters has superpowers, SL Huang has to find a way to neutralize(-ish) Cas’s superpowers in a way that doesn’t feel forced. I love the solution she’s come up with in Critical Point. The villain they’re facing has the power to surgically alter humans such that they engender very specific emotions in those who encounter them. The Australian bomber is forgettable, which is troubling in its own right. But much scarier are the dogs and man designed to engender pure, debilitating fear in anyone who looks at them. It’s a brilliant way of getting around Cas’s superpowers in fight scenes, honestly, and it taps straight into my pleasure centers re: the whole face-swapping plotline on Jane the Virgin, another really superb CW show.
(God, like, I know the world is in many ways garbage, but how fucking blessed are we to share a world with the CW? It had Jane the Virgin and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, somehow both at the same time??? Like. Gah.)
I will now do a small spoiler. It will be confined to the next paragraph only. Do not read the next paragraph if spoilers are not your thing.
My one small note on the book’s plot is that because it’s quite complicated, I think it throws a wrench in the works that nobody’s ever sure whether Pithica is doing all these wickednesses (despite their deal with Cas to leave her alone). In fact Pithica is not doing all these wickednesses, so it just gums up the works to have their involvement in question. And the works are already quite complex! There are many moving parts (allies, adversaries, people in need of protection) and red herrings! If it were me, I’d have found a way, early on, for Cas to reassure herself that this wasn’t Pithica. Then the plot would be clearer throughout, and the reveal at the end — that Pithica needed this situation dealt with and mildly manipulated Cas into dealing with it — would have had more bite.
Apart from that, Critical Point was as fun as its predecessors. Part of me hopes that SL Huang will go on writing this series for years, though another part of me knows that she has some queer fairy tale-ish sorts of stories in the hopper, and I want those too. In conclusion, I guess, please read this series so the publisher will want more of them, and then SL Huang can do whatever she wants.
Note: I received an e-ARC of Critical Point from the publisher for review consideration. This has not impacted the contents of my review.