It Happened One Doomsday (A Dru Jasper Novel) by Laurence MacNaughton

Dru runs a magical shop and though she sells many books, items and spells, unlike her mother, her magical power is limited.  The one thing Dru wants to do is help people.  When Greyson comes into her shop complaining about having dreams about the end of the world, Dru vows to help.  What she doesn't realise at the time, is that she is signing up to save humanity because as luck would have it, Greyson is about to become one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

It Happened One Doomsday is a cross between urban fantasy and paranormal romance.  From the ending, it's clear that MacNaughton has more story that he wants to tell and so the rushed pace of this book combined with the insta love make absolutely no sense to me.  MacNaughton could have taken his time and actually built his characters, thus making them feel real; however, after reading 280 pages I don't feel like I know anything real about them.

The one thing Dru knows for sure is that she doesn't want a relationship with a sorcerer because of the instability that would result.  She has settled into a relationship with Nate - a dentist.  Dru worries that Nate's secretary is going to make the moves on him and the fact that despite the many things Nate has seen, he still doesn't believe in magic.  Nate is as straight and white as a loaf of wonder bread.  When Greyson walks into her shop, she's immediately attracted to him. He doesn't believe in magic either but there's nothing like growing horns on your head and having your eyes turn red to convince you that magic just might be real.

Dru's angst between Greyson and Nick really comes down to her questioning what kind of life she wants to live.  Nick leads to a house in the suburbs with 2.5 kids, a picket fence, a dog and no magic. It means security and safety.  Greyson represents the road less traveled.  There's no security because danger abounds and Dru will be forced to push her magical powers to their limits. The problem with all of this is that when the world is ending, it seems as though relationship angst could most certainly wait.  Travelling to try to stop the fifth seal of the apocalypse from opening, is no time to be wondering which man you should choose.

Crimes Against Magic (Hellequin Chronicles #1) by Steve McHugh

Nathan Garrett has had his memory taken from him and has therefore spent the last ten years knowing nothing about himself but his first and last name.  He's spent the intermittent years working as a thief, using magic when necessary to get by.  When a chance meeting leads little droplets of memory returning, Nathan has no idea just how complicated the life he left behind was.  If that were not enough, an old enemy has surfaced and is determined to take make the people Nathan cares about pay to bring about and end to their centuries old feud.

Crimes Against Magic floats between 15th century France and the present day. I normally don't have a problem with flashbacks if they add something significant to the story but found that they kept pulling me away from the exciting action that was happening in the present.  Furthermore, any tension in 15 century France was impossible to maintain for the simple fact that we know that hundreds of years later, Nathan would be facing the antagonist once again.   If anything, the time in the 15th century was used for a blatant info dump about who Nathan is. It certainly didn't add anything to the current days meta.

In what should have been an interesting twist, McHugh created an extremely magically diverse world.  Picture a world in which werewolves, vampires, King Arthur and his court, Mordred, gargoyles, The Fates and Achilles are real and have a role to play. It should have been epic but at times it really just felt like supernatural name dropping. For instance, what is the point of invoking a wizard as powerful as Merlin but then not utilizing him as a character whatsoever? Even Achilles was a fake.

There are several familiar themes running through Crimes Against Magic.  It's best described as Harry Dresden meets Jason Bourne  meets James Bond.   I must admit to being excited by the premise; however, it quickly became clear that Nathan Garrett is little more than an epic Gary Stu. Nathan is so perfect that women either want to play the damsel for him, sacrifice themselves for him, or fuck his brains out.  What they all have in common is that they are all gorgeous.  This means that none of the female characters, even those who are powerful, really get the development that they deserve. Instead, we got the pleasure of having a woman beaten near to death for Nathan's pain. Sure Nathan feels bad but once he figures out who he really is, he's got better things to do than stick around.

Killing Rocks (The Bloodhound Files #3) by D.D. Barant

With a lead on Asher and Stoker, Jace is headed to Vegas to hopefully catch the one mage who can take her home and fill out her employment contract by taking Stoker out. Naturally, any plan that Jace is involved in cannot run smoothly.  Before she knows it, Jace is seperated from her team, Charlie has been enchanted and her only two allies are Tair - her former doctor/friend turned evil and a spy from another world she doesn't know.  All of Jace's choices are bad but she knows that she must move forward if she has any hope of saving her friends and while she's at it, the world.

Of all of the books in The Bloodhound Files that I have read to date, Killing Rocks seems easily the most confused.  First, we have the switch to several different planes of existence and the creatures which inhabit them.  It made it hard to understand what was what and where exactly the story was taking place at any given moment.  There were too many unfamiliar myths wrapped into the story and some quite frankly never become relevant.  At times, Killing Rocks is overly descriptive making it a struggle not to skim - a struggle I lost in passages of the novel.  

In Killing Rocks, we saw a lot of Jace's former life as part of a dream spell which haunted her.  In these scenes we saw her work interactions with serial killers, trying to assure that they paid for their misdeeds and the toll it took on her.  This is one of the few times we have seen Jace vulnerable and it really worked.  The kick ass protagonist able to whip her gun out and order people around is a bit of a cardboard trope and Jace's backstory and personality needed to progress beyond the constant and mostly juvenile sarcasm.

In Killing Rocks, Barant started to deal with what makes one a slave, with uprising of the golems.  Charlie believes strongly that golems should be in charge of their own reproduction and no longer wants to be viewed as a commodity.  He tells Jace that lems are people even they don't care about food or sex.  It takes a little while for Jace to start to see Charlie's point of view and when she does, she realises that parents don't charge their children for being born, yet that is not the case with Lems. She further realises that the right to procreate should be a basic right, yet it's withheld from Lems.  This line of thought by Jace is unfortunately very brief.  I think that Barant could have delved deeper into this.  I did however like who the world learned how central lems are for running it efficiently.

Review: Biting Cold by Chloe Neill, Book 6 of the Chicagoland Vampires

 Merit and the newly resurrected Ethan are on a road trip to desperately find the Malefacium, a book of all of magic’s evil that has been sealed away for millennia. Mallory, Merit’s best friend and a sorceress, has been driven to her limit by her addiction to dark magic and is determined to bring down the barriers of good and evil – no matter the cost and no matter who it hurts.

But Mallory isn’t the only one interested in the book. Tate, the former Mayor of Chicago, drug dealer, murderer and supernatural being of unknown origin is also after the book for his own purposes. When they find it, the story is just beginning, because a whole new force is unleashed on the world. Tate’s nature is revealed, and it’s worse than any of them expected.

Finding out how to stop him seems an almost impossible task as they dig through the records of history, consulting magic, fae and gnomes in an attempt to bring him to heel.

To add to the drama, Cadogan house faces ongoing investigation from both the Greenwich Prisidium and the Mayor of Chicago. And, after Ethan’s resurrection, there’s ongoing magical problems that may threaten his relationship with Mallory.

This series continues to have the wonderful, wide, rich world I love. The different supernatural creatures, all with their own unique twists that set them apart from other Urban Fantasy really adds to make this a unique series.

I like the characters, they’re very human now they’ve finally grown up. And Merit’s relationship with Lindsey and the other guards and friendly vampires is great fun – and shows a mundane side to the protagonist’s life that most urban fantasy’s miss. Most protagonists are either fighting, worrying or having sex, it’s rare to see them sitting around having a pizza night. And I do love Merit’s love of food, it’s a nice human quality to her, even though I generally don’t like vampires eating.

The story itself is decently paced with few flat down time moments. It twists quite abruptly from what I expected with the epic fight for the Malefacium being over almost instantly, but leading to a new, much more epic conflict that also fills in a lot of the gaps from before.

Review: Blue Moon by Laurell K Hamilton, Book 8 of the Anita Blake Series

 

Anita is awakened by a phone call from Richard’s brother – Daniel. Richard has been arrested on charges of rape. Anita is more than a little doubtful of the charges and, naturally, having police and legal connections, she drops everything and makes the flight to Tennessee, despite Jean-Claude’s insecure reservations.

Travelling as a human servant and Lupa is not simple, however, and she quickly finds herself embroiled in local pack politics and in conflict with the local master of the city, who fears and invasion and the power of Jean-Claude’s triumvirate in his territory. Having to dance to werewolf politics and being openly at war with the local vampires complicates things a little.

But then there’s the reason they’re there. Richard has been opposing the sale of land that an endangered troll species inhabits – but the person doing the buying is far more dangerous than he imagined. With his full resources – both mundane and mystical – he is determined to make Anita and Richard leave, but this is a battle they cannot walk away from.

To complicate things further, there’s also Anita’s relationship issues – namely that she left Richard after sleeping with Jean-Claude. Between that and Richard’s exes, there’s a lot of tension to navigate.

The plot is actually really involved and written. We start with a simple mission – to save Richard and find out what’s happening. This quickly escalates not only in to a perplexing mystery (why go to this much effort to evict the trolls?) but then adds a layer of epic to become a fight that Anita simply cannot avoid. As the book says, when evil draws a line in the sand, good can’t just walk away. The depiction of Niley and Linus, their backstory and the books’ descriptive style establishes them as EVIL with a capital E. This lends a strong sense of epic to the story and the sense that there is no way Anita and Richard could just go home and let the trolls get on with it. There’s more depth and strength to it – more hangs on it than a simple local land issue and it gives and extra urgency and power to Anita’s actions and those of her enemies.

The book also continues one of the strength of many of the Anita Blake novels, there are several plots running alongside each other yet, at the same time, linked. We have Verne’s werewolf pack, the vampire and their fear of Jean-Claude, there’s Anita’s regular power hiccoughs – and there’s the core plot, Niley and his nefarious plots and the influence he spreads. All of them run together, they’re all well paced, none dominates the other and they all come together in a really neat fashion. None of them feel like distractions so much as the actual consequences in the supernatural world of moving out of state. It’s not a case of simply focusing on the plot line and the rest of the world conveniently fading into the background (except Anita’s job – which regularly seems to be cancelled at short notice without damaging Anita’s income at all).

I also like the book’s portrayal of police corruption – and how Anita and Richard are both very dependent on both their extensive connections and the fact they have lots of nice, upper class, respectable witnesses to prevent the worst of the Sherriff’s excesses. It’s made clear that these are the only things holding the corrupted police at bay – and also just how much power a crooked sheriff in a small town can actually have.

Review: Thirteen by Kelley Armstrong, Book 13 of the Otherworld Series

After the events of the last book, the supernatural world is devolving into chaos. Split along the lines of those who want to reveal the supernatural and those who wish to remain concealed, there is a war fighting on every plane of existence. Not just Earth, Angels are turning against Angels, Lord Demons are mustering against each other. In the confusion, all rules are being broken, demon beasts are manifesting in the real world, Angels are taking flesh, demi-demons are possessing humans, even children, against all established laws and treaties.

People are panicking, in one move against the reveal movement, a group of anti-revealers are taking extreme measures to convince people it’s a bad idea – unleashing drugged, frenzied werewolves, manifested demons and starving vampires among groups of humans to show how bad it could be – leaving a horrendous mess and piles of bodies in their wake.

And Giles, leader of the reveal movement, is getting desperate. Harried by the Cabals, the anti-reveal movement, the interracial council and with his laboratory destroyed in a explosion, he is losing control. He tries to tighten his fist on defectors and to wave his carrot of immortality – but his serum isn’t ready – and the people who take it are becoming savage monsters. It doesn’t stop him trying to use it widely among the potentially influential.

Then there’s the Lord Demons – who are quite willing to possess without summoning, recruiting, looking for their offspring – and setting Cabals into civil war.

Chaos.

That sums up this book – everything is falling apart and all the rules are being broken – and it’s so excellently well done. Between the Lord demons and the Cabal squabbling and random possession and demon beasts, they run from event to event with each and every one of them being something that SHOULD NOT BE. We get a really strong sense of both the desperation and the sheer uniqueness of how completely wrong everything is.

Review: Broken by Kelley Armstrong. Book 6 of the Otherworld Series

Elena, Clay and Jeremy are contacted by an old acquaintance – Xavier, the Half-Demon guard from Stolen. When she was in the compound he did her a further, the debt remains unpaid. Of course, Xavier knows better to hold the debt over a werewolf so he offers them a deal – he helps them again in finding a rogue werewolf and they help him steal a letter – the From Hell letter connected to the Jack the Ripper case that is in a Sorcerer’s private collection.

It seems like a simple snatch and grab, albeit one that requires the werewolves’ unique abilities. But when they get the letter free, they find it is far more than it seems, with portal placed within it. From out of the portal a little of Victorian London comes through – including cholera, aggressive rats, and possibly Jack the Ripper himself – and a couple of zombies. All unleashed on an unsuspecting and unprepared Toronto.

The pack has no ties here, but is faced with a disaster they are responsible – but how much do they risk to fix it, especially with Elena being heavily pregnant?

I actually like the fact that this story is based on the characters screwing up. Seems odd to say since I often rail against character foolishness. But their screw-up isn’t based on (much) foolishness, there was no way, with their state of knowledge, that the characters could possibly have known the consequences of their actions. Even if they did know about Sorcerer magic, there’s no way they could have guessed or reasonably have expected the From Hell letter to be a part of that. It shows characters who are not perfect, are faced with major consequences that are their fault – and that they have both guilt and responsibility for. And it shows that sometimes, even with the best intentions, shit happens. It shows that characters can actually get it wrong and be flawed WITHOUT being Too Stupid To Live. Even when it’s character like Jeremy, renowned for his near perfect intelligence and planning, he can still be caught off guard by his own ignorance – no character is perfect, no-one knows everything and everyone can screw up without us having to shatter believability.

I also think they did a very good job of covering both reasonable guilt and responsibility without everyone curling into a small ball and wailing at the angst of it all.

The story was well paced, which is something I love about this series. They’re never rushed but never does the down time feel like it’s dragging or dull – which is especially hard to do in an investigation. Though there are leads that don’t go as far as expected (because no investigation does) each adds its own twist to the story and advancing the plot. We were introduced to some new characters including Zoe who is pretty fleshed out – and we ship Jaime in who is always a favourite of mine. With all these books just seeing all these characters we’ve come to know interacting with each other is great fun and seeing the full story and relationships develop really adds to the world. And through their helping each other we learn more about ther abilities, more about how the structures work without ever having to resort to info dumping or lecturing.

It was also interesting returning to the werewolf pack after the break with Paige, Lucas and Eve, so much time has passed and it would be interesting to see what had changed and evolved. And I do like Elena and Clay as characters when Clay isn’t playing Neanderthal man and epitomising the Hauptman Effect, which, to be fair, he didn’t in this book beyond the hovering over Elena’s pregnancy. The problem is I don’t think a lot did change and evolve from Stolen – yes there’s a lot easier relationship between Clay and Elena but, at the same time, everything is eclipsed by the huge great spectre of the ZOMG!PREGNANCY meaning that relationship, and the wider relationship with other pack members doesn’t get much showcasing.

Review: Industrial Magic by Kelley Armstrong, Book 4 of the Otherworld Series

Paige and Lucas are back, now having settled down in Portland after the chaos of Dime Store Magic that completely ruined Paige’s life

But Paige herself is feeling a little disconnected so far from her world – especially as Lucas’s life goal continues and often takes him away from her. It’s even more vexing that she feels pinned down by her duties as a parent for Savannah.

Then the in-laws get involved. Lucas’s father, Benicio Cortez CEO of the Cortez Cabal, is constantly trying to rope Lucas back into the family fold however he can – and Paige just became another way to reel him in. with a case that Paige and Lucas couldn’t possibly refuse, they’re recruited to find out who is killing the children of Cabal employees

Unfortunately, working for the Cabal is far from simple. Politics between the Cabals, the Cabals’ contempt for witches and the Cabals’ own, selfish way of dealing with things means they’re not nearly as driven to find the truth as Paige and Lucas –even as the body count starts mounting.

The story was a very good mystery – there were questions and clues that were followed, political problems to get round with Cabal infighting, to say nothing of the problem of working for the Cabals in the first place. The progression was logical, the discoveries entertaining and it never dragged or bogged down all the while the character interactions were fun and amusing. And the investigation was sensible – there were no radical leaps of logic or silliness, it just followed logical clue after logical clue, using magic but not relying on it to provide a woo-woo answer to all their problems.

I still love this world with the varying supernatural forces with their own powers, abilities and politics. The cabals, the Sorcerers, the vampires, the half-demons – they all work well together and ensure everything remains diverse and interesting and they all came together well.

I really like how the Cortez Cabal is presented and balanced here, in fact, I like how balance in general is shown. The Cabals aren’t great evil organisations, but nor are they even slightly altruistic. They are callous, unfeeling, greedy and very self-centred – but nor are they vast crime organisations grinding people beneath them either. And the Cortez Cabal is better than the others, but at the same time isn’t the “good” Cabal, with Benicio being just as ruthless and cruel as any of the other Cabals when required. The same goes for balance generally – the bad guy isn’t evil for the sake of evil, he has a legitimate reason to be furious at the Cabals, just as the Cabals had a legitimate reason to make him furious in the first place. Lucas’s brothers aren’t just selfish and awful, Benicio’s actions ensure they have a reason to be resentful and angry. The motives are human and reasonable rather than caricatures and overly dramatic.

Review of Drink Deep by Chloe Neill Book 5 of the Chicagoland Vampire Series

Even though I have had issues with the first four books of this series, I was very excited to get my hands on Drink Deep.  When we last left the Cadogan vampires, Ethan was dead, having jumped in front of a stake meant for Merit and Merit was in a deep state of mourning.  I always knew that Ethan was going to be resurrected it was simply a matter of if Neill could write the story in a way that would seem realistic and compelling.

In the wake of Ethan's death, Malik has become the new master but the GP is threatening to disband the house.  The investigator demands a healthy diet for all vampires, cuts the blood rations in half and demands that vampires stop feeding from each and other and from humans.  Vampires are no longer allowed to congregate in groups larger than 10.  With all of the stress going on, somehow Merit has to find away to discover why the elements are not acting properly.  First the lake stops flowing and turns completely black and then the sky turns red.  The humans begin to believe that not all are the vampires responsible for the disruption but that they are potentially seeing Armageddon.

To solve the mystery of the imbalance Merit must visit, a siren, the queen of the fae as well as discuss the history of magic with none other than Tate. Someone knows the answer to what is going on, but can Merit find the answers before the final elemental sign becomes unstable?