September's recommendation: War for the Oaks, by Emma Bull.
One of the potential problems with urban fantasy -- particularly with urban fantasy that's trying to be very hip to the time of its writing and publication -- is that its cultural references age very quickly. Allude to "Tam Lin" and you're fine; it's survived the centuries without much trouble. Allude to Van Halen, and ten or twenty years later you're going to sound a bit dated.
War for the Oaks does, to some extent, suffer from this kind of ageing. It was written in the eighties, and boy does it show, in the music, in the clothing, in countless details of contemporary popular culture. This puts some readers off. On the other hand, if you're not too bothered by that effect, there's plenty in this book that stands up to the test of time just fine.
What makes me like it so much is that it's one of the few books I've read which does what I consider a good job of integrating Faerie into the modern world. It doesn't do so pervasively; the fae are still in the quasi-feudal structure we seem incapable of imagining them out of, for example, and most of the confrontations between the Courts take place in at least semi-natural settings. On the other hand, there's also a glaistig in a city fountain, and a key battle in a club. The fae take on modern dress, for the most part, but in the bits where it matters, I don't come away with an impression of them in trendy clothing; Bull manages to make them transcend that and carry the punch I think they should have.
The plot is familiar; I don't have enough data to be sure, but I think it's more a case of later authors imitating Bull than the other way around. The Seelie and Unseelie are at war, and are involving humans in their conflict; music plays a pivotal role. Common tropes, these days, but I don't object to that; what matters is that Bull succeeds in making me believe in the power the music can carry -- or rather, since I feel that power very keenly anyway, she makes me believe that her characters can produce it. I don't mind common tropes, so long as they're executed well. And when the novel's climax depends on those tropes, well, they'd better be executed well.
In the meantime, the characters are entertaining and quick-witted; the phouka in particular is amusing and yet at the same time manages to convey, here and there, that he is not human and doesn't always follow the same social codes. The fae in this novel are not overly alien -- perhaps a minor flaw, for the part of me that really likes alien, inhuman depictions of fae -- but that's okay. It makes them easier to relate to as characters, and given the roles some of them play, the novel would be weaker if we didn't really sympathize with them as much.
So, it's not exactly a recent book, but Bull is an author who's never really gotten that much attention, so I figure she deserves a nod. (And maybe two, if I get a chance to re-read Bone Dance and decide whether to recommend it or not.)