Elemental Masters, Book 1.
A poor memory is sometimes quite nice. I could have sworn that I had read this book before along with the other early books in the series, but like On Basilisk Station a few days/weeks ago, I remembered absolutely nothing about it. Something I read somewhere recently (probably in a wiki) put me on notice that books in the elemental masters series are based, at least loosely, on traditional fairy tales. This is The Beauty and the Beast.
It is set in turn-of-the-century San Francisco - so besides all the nicely crafted Lackey fantasy we have, inevitably, the great San Francisco earthquake. The "beast" is a Firemaster who has seriously messed up his life by attempting unwisely to turn himself into a werewolf and ending up stuck somewhere between. The "beauty" is a young woman who is a doctoral candidate in classics at the University of Chicago who is orphaned and cast adrift by the death of her improvident father. The beast recruits her to assist in his researches to attempt to correct what he has done to himself since his form as neither wolf nor man and has left him unable to write or turn pages or even to read without great difficulty.
Rather than misunderstanding and such creating the crisis, we have a fairly conventional evil villain - and the ultimate crisis occurs in the midst of the earthquake. Fun.
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