I'm quite sure you're talking about Patricia Briggs "Mercedes Thompson" series.
Oh. My mistake.
Most of the imaginitive stuff is now self published for this reason. Get a Kindle Unlimited account and you'd be surprised what kind of cool stuff you can find. I'm going to be doing that with my own fic, which does have some discussion about race, but I have ZERO interest in going through the modern ethics Hunger Games experience in order to be published.
Yeah, I'm probably going to self-publish or something.
In my career I published for third party franchises, I put out original stories under existing publishing houses, I was tasked to judge others' creative works and I self-published. Don't think that the third job is evil or self-publishing easier. You must develop objective critical skills in your work or - better yet - pay a good editor out of your pocket. When I see a problem in someone else's work, among the first things I say is "You can hear about this problem from me and fix it or you can hear about it from the public, and by then it is too late."
Of course I also proceed to explain why I feel that it is a problem and I never fail to say "Anyway, this is your story. If you agree with my assessment, change it and the change is a disaster, that's still on you, not on me." And yet being a good editor is hard: you must understand the writer's poetic and try to understand why the story doesn't work according to
his poetic, not
your idea of a good story. It is this quality that allowed to Campbell to launch the careers of so many different SF writers (possibly renouncing to his own: he had pushed out "Who Goes There?" when he stopped).
Or, for a different example, one day Tom Clancy came to the decision that "he was too good for editors to tamper anymore with his writing". From that day on he had "veterans of the Falklands" in 1981, a chemical attack at the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney that used a compound "especially adapted to the Summer climate" (I'll leave to you to edit this one), someone evaluating the attempt on the Pope by watching it live on TV when no such images ever existed, a "state-of-the-art computer with a 486 processor" in the early 2000s and more.
By all means, self-publish: just remember who kick in the behind when "The elf was moving silently, bow, arrow and sword in one hand..." remains in your book.