Swarm by Dalya Moon

Title: Swarm
Series: Paranormal Poke Chronicles
Author: Dalya Moon
Previous Books in Series: Zan (previously titled Poke)
Rating: 4 stars
Length: 3295 Kindle units

Refresher: Zan can learn girls’ secrets when they put their fingers in his belly button.

Okay, everyone who knows me, stop laughing RIGHT NOW.

For those of you not in on the joke, it helps to know that I am pathologically afraid of bees. Not just like, “Oh, ho-hum, I should avoid that giant wasps nest.” No, it’s full out phobic, raving lunatic fear. So, yes, there were a couple of pages I had to skip in the middle of the book when Zan was attacked by a swarm of bees that he had coughed up. But for the most part the bees were incidental, and I could get past it.

I enjoyed Swarm, as I did Poke/Zan. Zan is a delightfully hapless narrator, and it’s fun to watch him try to figure out what’s going on in his life. His powers are growing, and otherworldly forces have asked him to solve the murder of one of the people who tried to kill him in the previous novel. This is complicated by the fact that his powers are behaving strangely, and it all seems related to this strange bee ring that he found at the scene of the crime.

On some levels, though, I was disappointed in Swarm. In the first book, it’s easy to dismiss a lot of the confusion as Zan drifting cluelessly through events that he doesn’t really understand. This does not work as well when he is trying to do something that requires a lot of logical processing, like solving a murder. He keeps getting distracted, which occasionally leads to tangents like a large segment that did not make much sense to me because I’ve never seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. (I know, I know. I just have this weird aversion to Matthew Broderick.)  I figured out who the murderer was long before Zan did, and it wasn’t like I had any information that he didn’t.

I was also hoping that we would get a clearer picture of the mythology in Swarm, but everything still seems really random, to the point that I’m starting to wonder if there IS an underlying mythology. But the second to last chapter gives hints that there is a greater overarching force affecting Zan’s life, so I’ll probably stick around for at least the next novel.

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