It’s been a hot minute since I read the previous novel in the series, but S.M. Reine is good about bringing up what happened to characters as part of their history, not an info dump. In this story, the U.S. government is proposing a new bill that would regulate “preternaturals,” that is, Americans who are also witches, werewolves, etc. Reine doesn’t seem shy about the comparison to Japanese internment camps from our shameful American history.

Bitter Thirst was published in 2017, meaning Trump was president and screaming about “illegals” and “building the wall.” Reine, whom last I knew shared a mailing address in Reno, NV on her website, likely knows the political chaos intimately because she lives in a state that had almost 900,000 Hispanic and Latino people during the 2020 census.

Even better than reading an urban fantasy novel that addresses real concerns is how our main character, Cèsar Hawke, doesn’t know how he feels about the new bill. It sounds like a good idea to him to put some controls on the populations he works with, because they can cause a lot of chaos. But everyone Cèsar cares about is against it. So, why can’t he just make up his mind? Bias confirmation makes Cèsar think that laws will prevent crime if someone exists in a certain category and is regulated.

Mostly, he’s not thoughtful (he acknowledges he hasn’t read the 500-page bill) and totally a coward. As the novel progresses, Cèsar struggles with delineating the ones he cares about into simply “good” and “bad” groups, leaving readers in an uncomfortable place in which we have to question a lot of folks and their intentions. I should have known, though; Reine did this to me a few series ago!