Grave Matters (Night Owls #2) by Lauren M Roy

Ellie has a home. And a family. And friends. She’s not entirely sure how to deal with having any of these things since they’re all somewhat alien to her. She’s a hunter, a nomad, a warrior – this new life takes some getting used to. Even including being hired as a hunter for the vampire Strigoi.

But a necromancer comes to town and starts causing trouble for the enter Night Owls’ family, raising ghosts, sending ghouls rampaging through Justin’s mentor’s home and threatening to bring spectres from Sunny and Lia’s past. Worse, he seems to be involved deeply in a brewing conflict between the Strigoi and a new vampire organisation, the Osin. War is being declared, but who is doing the declaring?

This is a book that, to me, is defined by its characters. I’m actually hard pressed to say who the protagonist is. I lean towards Ellie, simply because she was pretty much the protagonist in the first book and because there’s a slight emphasis on her. This multiple protagonist element works because they all have compelling storylines and characterisations – and actual character growth

Ellie has a lot of growth and building over such a huge change in her life. She has gone from a nomadic hunter of the supernatural with only one person to rely on (who is now dead) and now she has a family (a brother she has issues with due to what she saw as his previous abandonment), she has friends, she has a stable, static existence and she’s not entirely sure how to be this person. How to be domestic, how to have other people in her life – and that shows a lot with her still pursuing a hunting job not so much for morals or even money per se (though it’s a bonus especially since her viewpoint is constantly used for some excellent class commentary. She and Cavale spent most of their lives poor and have been denigrated and dismissed because of it) but simply because hunting and fighting is something she knows, something she can have without the others.

And there’s Cavale, her brother. He had strong reasons for “abandoning” Ellie and the despised man who raised them. But there’s the difficulty of Ellie still worshipping him and Cavale’s guilt and Ellie’s resentment. Like Ellie, even though he has been stable for some time, he has no experience of a domestic existence and now he has a sister, there living with him. His insecurity, his worry about how to make her happy, about whether she’s just going to leave and how he actually can make a household; which then leads to Ellie not knowing how to deal with her brother trying to play house.

There’s a brief suggestion that Cavale may be bisexual or gay – in one line he comments on the physical attractiveness of another man. It’s somewhat out of nowhere and never mentioned again which kind of bemused me and I had to go back a second time to check. It’s one line so I’m kind of waiting before flagging this.

Night Owls (Night Owls #1) by Lauren M Roy

Val is a vampire, running her bookshop with Chaz, her Renfield and living a normal life – very normal, away from all the messiness of vampire politics or of her past

Until Elly enters her life. Elly, protégé of the great hunter, Father Value, has a book that the old hunter gave his life to acquire – a book that may hold the key to the Jackals (or Creeps) increasing their dwindling numbers. Since the Jackals are monsters who eat human flesh with a special taste for virgins, no-one really wants that.

But the Jackals are very eager to get their prize back and as they amass in greater and greater numbers, Val and Elly have to take greater risks and make some dubious deals to keep the book safe.

Especially since the book has decided to lodge part of itself in a college student that they’d both rather didn’t die.

That was fun.

Which is odd, because this book is also pretty involved with several well developed characters who are interesting and nuanced, more than a few difficult and fuzzy situation and a decent plot that draws all of them together. Such books tend to be deep or interesting or fascinating or exciting – but they don’t tend to be fun. They don’t usually have the lightness to them to be fun.

Night Owls is fun. It manages to hit that balance that keeps all the dark, heavy scenes and all their impact – while still keeping a lightness that is fun which is really really hard to do. Usually one or other has to be sacrificed

The star of the book – and this balance – was the characters. We had a number of characters and I honestly can’t pick a protagonist – either Val or Elly are prime candidates. But all characters have some depth and motivation behind them giving them a strong history and strong presence and motivation. There’s Val with her past as a hunter, bad experience with vampire clans  and general wish to lead a nice, peaceful life – which is so much BETTER than a legion of Musty vampires we’ve seen who randomly decide to normalise for some random, ill-defined and ill-explained guilt. Elly has just forcibly been ripped from under the shadow of Value, her mentor and a truly great hunter; she has an excellent mindset of finding her future, her chosen past while at the same time having her hero-worship of her former father-figure slowly chipped away. Both these character’s experiences and growth are showcased through others – Chaz, the Renfield and in many ways the very avatar of Val’s normality and Cavale, another former student of Value’s whose anger brings home to Elly their mentor’s flaws as well as underscoring how ill prepared she is for the world. But even these characters have their own motivations and issues that go beyond mere extensions of the characters they complete.