Night Shift Dragons by Rachel Aaron
Rachel Aaron’s DFZ (DETROIT FREE ZONE) series comes to a conclusion with the third novel, published in 2020, Night Shift Dragons. For this review, I’ll assume you’ve already read its predecessors, Minimum Wage Magic and Part-Time Gods. (There will be spoilers for those books in this review.)
The story begins right where Part-Time Gods left off. In that novel, we watched Opal suffering under the authoritarian maneuvers of her father, the powerful Dragon of Korea. He put a bad-luck curse on Opal to try to force her to leave the DFZ and return to North Korea. Despite this poor treatment, when her father encountered his own misfortune and his life was threatened, Opal came to his rescue.
Now the two of them are reluctantly stuck together and off the grid in the DFZ. Opal continues to work as an appraiser for the city’s avatar, and to train with her own magic, while she tries to nurse her father, who is basically a ghost, back to health. She worries that if he doesn’t get back to Korea soon, the country may be destabilized. All of this daddy-daughter time causes a lot of stress, but it also allows them to finally begin to understand each other.
Meanwhile, Nik doesn’t know if Opal is alive, or even if she wants to see him after she walked out on him in the previous book. Tragically, he has sold his services to the crime boss who requires Nik to fight in the arena in the unregulated section of the DFZ called Rent-Fee. When Opal and her father attend one of Nik’s brutal fights, they discover the presence of evil magic which they hope they can destroy. To do this, they will need a lot of help from friends and enemies alike.
Night Shift Dragons is a satisfying, even sweet, finale which heralds a hopeful future for the DFZ. There are a few too many speeches in the novel, and I was bored by Opal’s magical training sessions, but the story is, overall, entertaining, the characters are likable, the setting is really cool, and the plot is, as usual for Rachel Aaron, well-paced.
It was nice to see some characters from the HEARTSTRIKERS series, and I especially loved the unexpected appearance of a character who’s new to this trilogy that we get to see an entirely new light at the end of this novel.
If you’re planning to read the DFZ trilogy, I highly recommend the audio versions narrated by Emily Woo Zeller.
I like the covers–charming.
Me too. They’re great.