Tim Pratt The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl

The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl

Tim Pratt

Bantam, Dec 2005, $12.00, 402 pp.

ISBN 0553383388

Marzipan "Marzi" McCarty is the night manager at the coffeehouse Genius Loci, the place where famous artist Garmond Ray painted seven murals in seven different rooms before vanishing without a trace. Marzi thinks of her work at the coffeehouse as a job, but her vocation is writing the comic strip Rangergirl, a heroine fighting Evil in the contemporary west.

Strange things start happening in and around the coffeehouse. A regular customer wants to free the earthquake god trapped in Genius Loci. Jane, another patron, wants to free the imprisoned dark goddess of the earth goddess. Jane is killed, and her doppelganger, made of mud with extraordinary powers, tries to kill Marzi. Jonathan who has come to study the muralist's work wants to see the Desert Room which Marzi has closed off. She has repressed memories of the Evil that is behind the closed door holding the mural, and she has become the guardian charged with keeping the evil which manifests himself as the Outlaw, the evil sorcerer in her comic strip, from busting free and destroying Santa Crux, and then the rest of California, and maybe the world. The malevolent being who has opened his prison a millimeter, has influenced people to try to free him, but he hasn't factored in Marzi and her friends who try to stop him.

The setting in the real world is the modern day west, but evil lives in a realm where the old west is given form in another plane, but occupying identical space as Santa Cruz, where the book takes place. This is a fantastic classic good vs. evil confrontation, where both sides have powers in the final battle that will decide what happens to the rest of the planet. Dealing with the evil, one has forced the heroine to repress those memories, and only lets them out through her comic book. The spunky heroine will need everything she has, and more to triumph against overwhelming odds.

Harriet Klausner