The Rook (Daniel O'Malley)

The tag line reads, "On Her Majesty's Supernatural Secret Service," which is a pretty good indication as to the subject of the book. There's a super-secret organization in England (with counterparts in a few anglo-centric areas of the world) dedicated to using people with supernatural powers to fight problems generated by other entities with supernatural powers. The special conceit of this story is that it centers on one member of the organization, the Rook of the title (most of the organizational structure is inspired by chess, for unclear reasons) who starts the story by coming to standing in the rain surrounded by unconscious bodies, and she has no memory of her past self whatsoever. She finds a set of extremely chatty letters left for her by her former self and uses them to orient herself, identify the enemy who took her memory, and pretty much generally save the day. The story is fun enough, and I was never really tempted to abandon it, but belief just wouldn't suspend very well. The superpowers were an inexplicable mishmosh - this one can shape any metal with his fingers like putty, that one seems compelled to twist his otherwise-human body into pretzel shapes, this one oozes various toxic chemicals at will from his pores - they seemed arbitrary and nonsensical. I also had trouble with a really super-secret organization having such poor security, so that someone with no memory and just a few poorly-organized notes to go on could fake her way in without anyone suspecting she was a mole. Too may things seemed to happen just for the plot. To take an example from early in the story, no-memory girl is offered a choice by her former self: open one safe-deposit box at the bank and learn what she needs to know to function in the life she's stepped into, or open a different one and get everything she needs to start a new life elsewhere in the world. It apparently never occurs to her that she could open both before deciding. As I said, pleasant enough, but not much "there" there.