Review: Midnight Taxi Tango by Daniel José Older (Bone Street Rumba #2)
Title: Midnight Taxi Tango
Author: Daniel José Older
Series: Bone Street Rumba #2
Publication Date: January 5, 2016
Review Date: February 8, 2023
Rating: 4/5 ⭐️
A fantastic noir(ish) urban fantasy read, better than the first and left me wanting more.
Daniel José Older just knocked this one out of the park. I was a little more lukewarm on the series debut, Half-Resurrection Blues, but was still very intrigued and game to read the sequel.
Older did accomplish a lot in Half-Resurrection Blues: setting up the world, establishing Carlos’s character, his relationship with Sasha, and pulling off a serviceable noir. The world is firmly Brooklyn and comes with a delightful map in all of the books. Carlos is half-dead, a sort of revenant, with no memories before his death. He works for the Council of the Dead, a satirical bureaucracy that policies Brooklyn’s spectral denizens. While investigating a case, Carlos encounters another half-dead person, Sasha, and falls for her hard.
I call Midnight Taxi Tango noir(ish) because I feel like we trend a bit away from classic noir storytelling and into more traditional urban fantasy action, but that isn't an unwelcome change. Carlos is still a grizzled detective trying to get to the bottom of a case and save the girl, it's just the story unfolds in gloriously unexpected ways.
I think a lot of the reason I was more down on Half-Resurrection Blues is the protagonist, Carlos. We are stuck in his perspective for the entirety of the book and he's kind of a surly, grouchy dude who doesn't really know a lot about himself and also doesn't really care to know more. It's both a limited and limiting perspective.
Older expands that out by adding in Kia (a character from Half-Resurrection Blues and such a treat to follow in Midnight Taxi Tango) and Reza (a new character, a no nonsense lesbian taxi driver/criminal enforcer). We also see the returns of many great characters like Riley (Carlos's spectral partner), Mama Esther (a room-sized ghost who provides tea and library services), Baba Eddie (Kia's santero boss), and Sasha (now Carlos’s ex-girlfriend and mother of his twins).
Reza and Kia are awesome additions to the POVs and you can’t help but root for them, even though Reza is a bit homicidal and Kia is prone to poor judgment. Older also doesn’t shy away from exploring sexism, racism, and even colorism in an honest and realistic way.
And the big bad of this book are cockroaches, which seems silly but ends up being terrifying. What has more power than the creatures that have been here long before humanity and surely will outlive it...