This is, I think, the first of three books in what the collection I bought calls "The Wooden Man" series. I didn't know anything about it going in other than three 250 page novels for a total of $6 seemed like a worthy gamble. So what do we got?
Ray Lilly just got out of prison after being mixed up in some serious magical stuff involving his best friend, an other-dimensional monster, and a sorceress/witch/mage named Annalise. If he wants to remain breathing, he has to act as Annalise's "wooden man", essentially her lackey/decoy. If he disobeys, he dies.
Of course, he may die anyway on their mission: To investigate a little town in the Pacific Northwest with a toy company doing inexplicably well. Also, children around town are spontaneously combusting, their remains turn into silver worms, and everyone immediately forgets they existed.
Ray's very much the driver of the plot, for all that Annalise is the reason they're up there. She vanishes for long stretches of time where Ray's roaming around town, asking questions and getting abducted or threatened by various elements. Part of that may be due to the personality Connolly gives Annalise. Her preferred method of handling any opposition is to kill the person doing the opposing. It would rather remove the suspense from things, and her absence plays into the air of danger for Ray.
Connolly establishes that Annalise really doesn't give a crap whether Ray lives or dies. Being a wooden man is to be expendable. So he can't count on her showing up to save his butt. All he's got are his own smarts and the one spell he knows, which is a ghost knife. (When I read the book jacket describing him as only knowing one spell, I assumed using it would kill him, possibly involving fire. Hence, wooden man.)
I don't know that I buy Ray's slow-developing concern for Annalise's well-being, or that he should really care about whether he can help with her mission. Especially since there are multiple occasions where he passes up opportunities to just leave, even once he thinks she's dead. Maybe he'd get hunted down and killed by the other people in her secret society of sorcerers that protect the world (yeah, never heard that spiel before), but sticking around her isn't any better for his long-term prospects from where I stand.
It would probably help if I had more of the backstory on both of them and this world, because Ray's just guessing at a lot of stuff and I don't find Annalise a trustworthy source, either. We'll see if the second book has any of that when I get to it next month.
"At Hammer Bay Toys, did you notice anything strange about the fire?"
"You mean aside from the fact it shot out of the mouths of a bunch of middle-aged paper pushers?"
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