Bloodshifted (Edie Spence #5) by Cassie Alexander

Edie was rescued in the last book and her life saved from the parasite inside her – with an infusion of vampire blood. When a human drinks vampire blood they become a Daytimer, the people Edie had so often pitied when working in the hospital. Bound to vampires, the benefits of strength and resilience are offset by the enslavement to a vampire – mystically forced to obey their every command

And most vampires are not nice people, Raven, her new master, is certainly not one of them. Edie has to hope to survive until Anna can rescue her – originally planning to wait until her baby is born. But life as a Daytimer is fraught, dangerous and highly competitive and rescue plans – or escape plans – need to be speeded up. Especially since her conscience won’t let her stay idle in the face of Raven’s abuses and murders.

I really like Edie as a protagonist – she has so many excellent qualities that make her stand out as a special person without needing special shiny woo-woo that sets her above or apart, without her having to be the Chosen One. Edie is a nurse (and so is the author which means we have some excellent authenticity), and, now, a Blood Servant. But she’s a Blood Servant among Blood Servants, she’s still the bottom-of-the-rung baseline. But she’s intelligent (without being a genius), she’s brave (without being a foolish, defiant, RAWR-I-PROOVE-HOW-BADASS-I-AM-BY-HEADBUTTING-DRAGONS!), she’s extremely good – but not saintly. I think that last point is an excellent balance to strike; Edie is good. There are lines she won’t cross and she will risk herself to save someone, unable to live with herself if she didn’t. But she’s not going to do it without weighing up the risks and, ultimately, if she has to keep quiet or even do something terrible to save herself then so be it. She hits a great balance in a genre that is often quite inconsistent with their protagonist’s morality (often the confused result of wanting to write a super saint AND a ruthless badass at the same time).

What I wasn’t thrilled about is Edie’s single-minded focus on her pregnancy. Yes, she’s pregnant, yes she’s worried about the baby – but it’s ok for her to worry about her own life as well. It’s ok for her to be afraid and want to live without using the baby as, I don’t know, some kind of justification for self-interest? Like Edie doing every she did in order to live is not acceptable, but it’s ok so long as it’s clear she’s doing it for her pregnancy? And I’m quite sure the zygote isn’t judging Edie on her behaviour, she can stop worrying about that

I like that there is still a level of complexity to the meta-plot of this book and series. There are enemies (like Dren) who have become… well, if not friends, then reluctant and complicated allies. Which covers a lot of the relationships in this book – Anna is Edie’s friend and that’s true and endearing and powerful – but the concerns about her, what she represents and what she seems to be doing are legitimate. House Grey of the vampires is threatening and menacing and has been a terrible enemy far too often – but are they entirely in the wrong? Even the Blood Servants Edie spends time with – the friendly are only friendly to a given degree while even the most hateful of the enemies have a good reason for their opposition, hyper-competitiveness and general insecurity.

Deadshifted (Edie Spence #4) by Cassie Alexander

Edie and Asher are getting away from it all with a cruise. A nice, relaxing cruise.

But the supernatural came with them – Asher recognises a man from his less-than-respectable past and nearly risks their relationship to try and salve his conscience.

And then people start getting sick. And then they start dying… Then it gets truly horrifying.

I really liked the plot of this story – it was part medical mystery, part detective work, part survival horror – all melded together into an excellent whole. There was also a really strong emphasis on that horror with massive amounts of tensions and considerable grisly and gory scenes. I don’t mean in a gratuitous manner, the book didn’t try to shock the reader with endlessly descriptive scenes of blood and guts and mayhem – but it didn’t sanitise everything and the raw realness of the situation they were in, the horror of it was really well conveyed. In fact, while the nastily mutilated corpses were horrific, they weren’t nearly so much as the rows and rows of dead, the despair of the grieving  and the growing shock of what was actually happening. The horror of the loss and human reaction was more compelling than the mere horror of the mutilated corpses. I really can’t praise enough how well done this was; scale of it was conveyed in a way that is really rare to see in books (at least for me, I’m more visual than that).

The pacing is excellent - not so rushed that it becomes an action film but not so slow that the tension of the horror fizzles and dies.

I’ve always loved the world building – the different beings in this world come from a unique perspective because it’s all viewed through Edie’s lens. There’s little romance in it, little fluffiness and little regard of them as sexy or special or shiny – they’re dangerous, creepy and disturbing in so many ways and that is never forgotten

The authenticity of Edie as a nurse is always there – and that’s something I really appreciate about the series. Many times I will read a book and the protagonist will describe their profession and… I’ll just not buy it. Or it will sit awkwardly on the character. Sometimes the author knows too little about the profession, or the character feels too under qualified or ill suited to the profession or the profession hasn’t truly integrated with the character leaving me saying again and again “wait, isn’t she supposed to be a cop/detective/astro-physicist/circus performer?” While Edie is a nurse. It’s a major part of who she is and informs her decisions and viewpoints. Whether that’s her compulsive handwashing, her medical knowledge or her fear that she may be tarred and feathered by the nursing community for the cardinal sin of dating a doctor. The whole realness of Edie’s profession – and the author’s medical knowledge – makes the character herself so much more realistic and tangible. She feels like a full person, a full character.

Shapeshifted (Edie Spence Series #3) by Cassie Alexander

Edie is depressed. Since being shunned by the vampires and losing her job on Y4 she has settled into a much more routine, much safer existence as a nurse in a sleep clinic

It’s also dreadfully deadfully boring. She’s lonely, she’s lost purpose and she’s lost the advantages the Shadows could have given her

Which would be especially useful when her mother reveals she has terminal cancer. Only a miracle or magic could save her. Or vampire blood

Which means Edie needs a new way into the supernatural community that is shunning her. Chasing what desperate leads she can takes her to a charitable clinic in a poor area of town, searching for Santa Muerte. Working again as a nurse, she quickly finds herself in a much more energetic and dangerous environment – there may not be werewolves and vampires coming through the door – but there are gunshot wounds and gang members.

And something far more involved – magic and vampires hidden carefully from her, unless she can get someone to trust her with their secrets and maybe give her the key to healing her mother.

It’s awesome, go read it.

Why are you still here? Go read it! Go go go!

You haven’t read the previous books? Then go, read them, then read this.

Ok, fine, I suppose I’ll do a review beyond “awesome.”

Firstly, this is a story where I didn’t know where it was going until it went there. At no point did I anticipate what was going to happen, at no point did I guess the ending, at no point did I guess what Edie was going to do or what was going to happen to her. This story was original from the very beginning, lacking in clichés and left me guessing all the way through. I can’t stress how rare that is, how many books I can at least feel the shape of its going to end – but not this book, this book was a complete discovery right until the very last page.

I didn’t only not know what was going to happen, but I was completely surprised on several occasions. I can’t even refer to them without providing spoilers which would be a crime against humanity for which I would be (rightfully) shot. But I was very very surprised indeed.

It’s this uniqueness and surprise that makes it hard for me to talk about the plot because its originality is something precious not to be spoiled. But in terms of pacing, style, descriptiveness and general writing skill, this book hits the spot. It’s descriptive enough to get a full, powerful sense of the setting, without being overdone and dragging. We have the twists and the mystery and Edie’s lost, confused frustration of it all, without it being slow or slumped while at the same time not rushing through these scenes or skipping over any side issues. It’s an extremely well written book that you can easily read in one setting with brief pauses to growl angrily at people interrupting you; I suggest stocking up on aerodynamic objects for easy throwing.

I also really liked Edie as a character. She is strong and capable and competent within her field, being intelligent, hard working, dedicated and compassionate – which doesn’t involve super combat skills or being the most beautiful of them all or some special shiny magic power that is more special and shiny than them all. She has a life outside of the woo-woo, she has a family and thy have real, mundane problems that hit mundane, real people all the time. She has a job, she makes money, she needs to make money. She is a good person without being a dramatic, martyred saint. She gets irritable, she gets tired, she feels disgust when some poor unfortunate is filthy or smelly or otherwise revolting even while she helps them.

She’s such a real character – part of that is her job, this is one of those books where you can tell the author knows the profession inside and out – Edie is a nurse and it’s clear that Cassie Alexander is a nurse as well. But it’s also how she lives and reacts – like the time she spent on Y4 were high stress and dangerous – but now she is without that daily danger and that daily purpose of saving people’s lives she is not just bored but depressed as well; she has lost a lot of meaning in her life, even when it came with risk. Not only meaning but friendships and connections, a wider family of people who liked her and understood.

Her desperate urge to cling for a solution for her mother comes close to her doing the same for her brother (even as she has reached her last straw with him – again, not a saint) and even though, as readers, you can say “no stop, bad idea” it’s also clear that it’s something we’d all do if we had any possible hint of a way to save a parent. But at the same time this excellent, real character grows and by the end of the book we have her overtly addressing the fact she constantly lives for other people and needs to start making choices that put her more front and centre.

Moonshifted (Edie Spence #2) by Cassie Alexander

 Edie Spence, nurse on Y4, the secret floor of County Central Hospital where the supernatural are treated – the vampires, the werewolves and, in the past, even zombies and dragons. She doesn’t have nearly enough time, especially with the holidays coming up, and even less money hence her taking overtime during the holidays in the hope of more money to pad her rapidly disappearing paycheck.

That in itself would be exhausting, but that’s before the king of the werewolves gets run over in a hit and run right in front of her. He’s badly injured to the point of death and even the medical professionals on Y4 can’t raise the dead – but the werewolf politics should he die (and the accusations that fly) are dangerous things to get in the middle of.

And then there’s Anna, the vampire she preciously helped and even considers a friend. She has a job for Edie as she prepares to found her own vampire house, a job that requires her to keep a ceremonial knife safe.

Whichever is the cause – werewolf or knife –people start trying to kill her, ransacking her home and even risking the wrath of the shadows, the hospital’s mystical protectors, to get at her. And to make matters worse, her drug dealing brother is digging himself into trouble, her parents are coming for Christmas dinner and she has a German Ghostly Cyborg eating her electronics.

That was immense fun. I liked the first book, Nightshifted, and found it interesting and pretty entertaining, but Moonshifted is head and shoulders above it. With the beginning of this world introduced, we’re now running with this story in all directions and nearly everything is pretty much excellent.

The world building is incredible – there has been such a lot of research that has gone into the various supernatural lores that are relevant in this book – including the 101 ways to make a werewolf which is drawing on some really obscure legends that I had to re-look up and I thought I was pretty overwhelmed with shapeshifter legends already. The way the vampires work, the way the werewolves work – they’re all really really deep and with their own separate twists that add a lot of originality to the story; concepts like the werewolves’ shorter life span (which makes so much sense when described) and the vampire shortage not of human blood, but of actual vampire blood since it takes so long for them to produce. All of these add wonderful new facets to old myths and legends and a completely new spin on everything.

But along with the mystical world building which is wide open and growing, there’s also the powerful realities of being a nurse. I love books when the protagonist has a profession and I’m left thinking “this author has worked this job” because it’s so real, they’ve either worked it or really put some sterling effort into making it real. John Hartness does it, Diana Rowland does it and Cassie Alexander certainly does it. It’s not glamourised, it’s not sugar coated and it’s not clean – but the nitty gritty of nursing is there, the good and the icky, the sheer value and importance of it coupled with how undervalued and difficult it is. It’s a really good depiction and makes the entire series so much stronger and more real because of it.

What is best about both of these elements of world building is that they’re used appropriately. There’s no massive info dumps and no long monologues. It is shown rather than told, what we need to know is revealed in as much detail as we need to know it. It’s completely restrained and leaves me hungry to know more – like what exactly the Consortium, and Meaty, actually are for one! everything feels natural because the knowledge is presented in a realistic fashion without every leaving us floundering.

And the story is fun – it intertwines excellently with Edie’s life but her life doesn’t stop because of it. This is something else I love about this book, in a lot of Urban Fantasy it feels like the protagonist can just put their entire lives on pause while they deal with the plot of the book. Edie isn’t like that – she has a job, she needs money, she even needs the desperate holiday overtime. She can’t just not take those extra hours because the plot has been dropped on her, life goes on. And it’s not just her job – she has family she can’t just drop because dramas are happening, she had her brother and his issues, she has her parents coming round for Christmas Dinner. She can’t cancel all this – and she has to clean up the flat ready for them – just because she has plot drama! Life goes on! Perhaps most impressive to me is Edie’s friend’s – they have their own lives, their own issues and that isn’t subsumed because of Edie’s plot issues. Charles has a thing with werewolves, he’s not setting that aside because Edie is having problems. Gina has relationship drama, Edie can’t just ignore it because of plot reasons – he’s Gina’s friend, she owes it to her to be supportive. Edie can’t just refuse Anna’s plea because it would be convenient to do otherwise. This is such a change from so many urban fantasies where friends just exist to support the protagonist.

Review: Nightshifted by Cassie Alexander, Book 1 of the Edie Spence Series

Edie is a relatively new nurse dealing with many problems – student loans, making ends meet, her brother’s heroin addiction and dragons rampaging through the wards.

The latter because she’s a nurse on the Y4 floor. In exchange for the dark powers that run the hospital making her brother immune to the effects of drugs and alcohol, Edie has given up her more lucrative job at a private hospital to work treating the county’s supernatural community in the hidden Y4 ward. Vampires, wereanimals, zombies, shapeshifters and even dragons pass through the wards, all with their own illnesses and injuries to be treated.

Treating one of those patients drags Edie far deeper than she intended to go. Compelled – either by vampire wiles or her own conscience – to do the right thing, she seeks to save Anna, a vampire in a young girl’s body, from abuse. In doing so, she kills a vampire – and finds herself facing trial in which the punishment can be her very soul – if she does not mount an appropriate defence with what friends and allies she can muster. And it’s not like her daily life isn’t already complicated!

This book starts running. You open the book, get a brief introduction and then you sprint into the plot. Suddenly stuff is happening and characters are doing stuff and you’re not quite sure who they are why they’re doing what they’re doing or what it all means or what everything is or what the implications are – but it’s all happening and it’s all happening now so you better run to keep up or just drown in confusion. You don’t even know who the protagonist is but she’s killing vampires and rescuing people and someone’s dead and they’re a bad person – no, wait, they’re a good person… or not? And someone’s bitten – wait, she’s bitten twice? And there’s a fire and and and…

Right, take a deep breath, because, thankfully it doesn’t continue like that. After this sudden introduction wherein a huge amount of plot is thrown at you in a short space of time, the story then slows down. We get more of an introduction to Edie, her life and the world she is in. It’s slowed down and with the more sedate pace and chance to assimilate information, we get to fill in a lot of the gaps that were left hanging in the first part of the book. It’s still jarring and disorienting and I think some of the introduction could have done better before the action would have been better, but it does work.

After that beginning the rest of the book continues at an excellent pace. Neither rushing and leaving me breathless nor dragging or distracted. We have some time spent on world building – though I think I would have appreciated more with the sheer amount of supernatural gubbins introduced, it would have been nice to have more backing to them. That being said, we certainly had enough information to follow the story and the rest is left there as a tantalising carrot to bring me back for the next book to see more of this huge, fascinating world.

Edie herself is an interesting and very real character. I think I’d best sum her up as a cynical idealist. She wants to hope, she wants to do good, she is determined to care and to help people and feels guilt and pain when she makes a mistake or someone is hurt. Yet, at the same time, she has been through the school of hard knocks, she has few illusions about how harsh and cruel the world can be. She has a heart of gold with a cynical exterior – and I think it’s really presented well to encompass both, both her willingness to care with her lack of illusions of how hard the world can be. I think this is epitomised in her relationship with her brother, a heroin addict. She loves him, she cares for him, she worries about him and she sacrifices for him. Yet, at the same time, she has little expectation of him quitting his addiction, she knows she can’t trust him and is repeatedly driven to fury by his stealing from her.