Liar's Game (The One Rises #5) by Anna Wolfe

The Seer’s manipulations have become more and more blatant – not least of which is the virtual leash she’s placed on Silas, binding the powerful Demonborn and the leader of the Free Bitten.

Under the leash and with the desperate secrets he has to keep, his team is increasingly fracturing and out of his hands while he himself is more and more consumed with the fierce temptation for Callie which distracts him constantly

But despite the fracturing, the Seer has managed to keep her ties to everyone – to some mysterious end.

Ok, let’s address one of the nifty and annoying parts of the book. Yes it’s both at once.

See the entire plot involves people doing stuff because the Seer has manipulated things to make it. On the good side this means we get some final movement on some major plot points. We get a lot of meta development, a lot more insight into what the Seer actually is (which is pretty awesome) as well as a major sense of epicness about to happen. This story has always had big things happening in the background but, to a degree, we’ve had a much closer focus on Mark, Edie and Callie’s story. Stuff has happened in the background, but this is really about them, their personal development, their excellent family dramas, their coming to terms with their difficult pasts, their powers, their hungers and generally what it means to be Bitten. Certainly Silas and others have been far more involved in something greater and larger, but the main cast has been somewhat drowning in events set by other people

While we’re still very much focused on Callie and Silas (and, to a lesser degree, Mark and Edie) and their personal story –but now we are bringing in more and more wider elements. We can see how the Seer has manipulated Silas and so many others in the past. We can see how much all of this, the whole story, comes from the Seer pulling strings and always has. We can gain a sense of just what is at stake and the epic consequences and requirements of the Seer’s manipulations. We even get an insight into the Seer themselves, endless, but changing ruthless but driven and almost desperate while always in control

All of this is good

Poisoned by Deceit (The One Rises #4) by Anna Wolfe

Silas receives a message – a summons even – from the witches of San Francisco demanding his help. Witches are going missing, young witches, and one of them is very close to Edie’s ex-husband and ex-mother-in-law.

As they head to San Francisco they have to uncover a plot that risks the Covenant and save young lives before they get in too deep. But just as frightening, Edie has to confront the shadows of her past, people she hurt long ago and an extremely powerful witch who has every reason to hate her.

As is common with this series, this book is far more about the characters than the story. The book is split into multiple point of view sections – Edie, Mark, Silas and Callie and, again, it does it really well. I know I’ve said it every book, but I don’t think I should stop praising it just because I expect it – it really does work. Usually this would be jarring but seeing it from several viewpoints really helps see every character to their fullest. Without this insight into everyone’s head, Edie would seem quite emotionless and cold, Silas would seem uncaring and distant, Callie withdrawn and impulsive and Mark just an arsehole. Because we see inside their heads we see far more of the motives behind each character and it makes for both excellent development and complexity – especially when two characters are at odds and you can see both sides have a point.

One good example of this is the trust issues that permeate this book. Because of various woo-woo Silas has secrets that he simply cannot share with the others. Not doesn’t want to, but absolutely cannot. But at the same time the very nature of his training means he requires complete and unflinching trust from the others, without a shred of thought for privacy. This makes for some excellent development and conflict as Callie repeatedly holds back and even Edie has reservations, tempered by her much longer association with Silas.

There’s a lot of complexities and motives among the group with no-one really wrong because everyone has a point and a good reason for thinking what they think and doing what they do.

This book and series continues to be a wonderful subversion of many annoying elements of Urban Fantasy – especially in relation to feeding and control. The bitten in this world hunger, they need to feed. What they feed on differs from bitten to bitten, but common examples are pain, sex, fear, blood, anger – even devotion. Usually if they can feed on it, they have powers relating to it – and a hunger or drive towards causing it

In any other Urban Fantasy, this would be the cue for lots and lots of sexy times as the sex hunger-ers had lots and lots of sex with very little consent and excused it all with woo-woo, lots of guilt or guilt and woo-woo. They may occasionally complain about it, but generally a wonderful time is had by all

Ensnared by Magic (The One Rises #3) by Anna Wolfe

Mark has to spend some time with the witches as a consequence of a very unwise deal he made. Of course, he never expected a flirtatious witch – witches generally hold Bitten, humans bitten by Demon Ridden – in the highest contempt

Nor did he expect sleeping with Mimi to have such extreme consequences

Now, with a badly misaligned spell and witch politics feuding between the High Priestess and the Seer, it falls to Silas and his band to try and cover up this disaster and restore some sense of order.

I love this series of books, the first two were excellent and introduced me to this fascinating world that has well and truly hooked me in. I love the characters and I love how the shifting points of view lets me see all of the world, each other and the story through shifting lenses that expands everything with an extra level of richness. The writing hits that perfect balance being descriptive and emotive while still keeping the plot and story moving with any info-dumping nicely integrated into the text

I loved the first book, really loved the second book – and really looked forward to this one

And was a little disappointed. Not, I hasten to add, because it was a bad book! No no, not at all, not even remotely! But because my expectations are high and this book didn’t reach the heights of the previous two.

There wasn’t a lot of plot to this book. The witches are up to something that involves the One, but I’m not sure what nor is it completed in this book to add any clarity. Both the mysterious Seer and the, apparently malicious, High Priestess can see the future, so the events they manipulate are all about some long running plan we don’t know about. The witch shenanigans go wrong and we spend most of the rest of the book containing the wrongness.

It’s not bad – but it’s a middle of a longer plot. The beginning – why they’re doing this etc – is missing as is the ending of this actually achieving, so instead the characters I’m familiar with just drop in in the middle of an Event which hooks them in without any real explanation, resolution or depth.

This jumping in the middle also makes it really hard for me to connect to Mimi, a character we’ve only seen briefly in the past. Now there’s a lot from her point of view and I can’t connect with her – I don’t understand her motives, I am not invested in her in a character sufficiently to follow her this closely and, perhaps worst of all, we’re seeing her on her worst day. It’s not that I don’t care about her – I do, I care about her facing consequences, I care about her facing comeuppance. I read from her pov and wait for her to fail out of some kind of vicious schadenfreude – I want her to fail, I think she deserves to fail I look forward to her failing and when she faces pain and difficulty, I don’t empathise with her, I rather cruelly think “this is richly deserved”. Which probably says terrible things about me.

This also extends somewhat to Jiye, Mimi’s girlfriend. Do I think Jiye has every reason to be ragingly pissed? Definitely! Mimi’s treatment of her is outrageous, Mimi is grossly disrespecting her love, their relationship, her loyalty and making Jiye and her pain a very low priority in her life; if I were Jiye I’d be ragingly furious – with Mimi. But Mark, seduced into Mimi’s bed under a false agenda, drugged and then used for magic, is another of Mimi’s victims – and Jiye’s victim – and Jiye’s rage at him is repugnant.

This meant while I absolutely loved the revelations of Silas’s past (and there was so much awesome Silas growth this book and some really excellent history of the world and world building that I just wanted to dive into it all and tell the witches to take a hike) and the difficult choices he has to make, and I loved Edie and her battle to carve out of her own life and the difficulties she has with Hatter and I even liked mark and learning more about him, I ended up wanting way way way more Callie (who was not very present) and spent way too much time glaring daggers at the book when Mimi appeared.

One element that keeps coming up in the series in general and definitely in this book is consent – especially sexual consent. Many of the demons have the ability to feed from sex – and by “ability” that means they have to. Usually when we get some kind of woo-woo that forces characters to have sex I cringe because it’s usually presented as sexy in some way: even if the protagonist resents it, it’s still all kinds of sexy and even used as a chance for personal growth (or for the character to have lots of sex while still being “pure” because they “didn’t want it.”)

Addicted (The One Rises #2) by Anna Wolfe

Callie has found the Bitten and is now learning how to harness her abilities and learn all the things she needs about the world she has found herself in. Some of it is fascinating, a lot of it boring.

But Callie has reached the attention of Phaedron, his group and assorted allies pretty much united in their dislike of Silas – and Callie looks like an ideal tool with which to strike against him. Indeed, even Silas’s seeming growing affection towards Callie may consider it to be a weakness.

Other groups have laid their snares as well, and Edie finds another net laid for her and Silas through one of her close contacts.

Behind it all is the eternal threat of the One – a threat that seems to be encouraging the witches to set their own plans in motion

This is one of those reviews where I want to point to my review of the first book and say “ditto”. This is always a problem of reviewing a sequel when the author is consistent.  Like the first book, I found the characterisation, the world building and the writing excellent. The pacing moves well, the story is exciting and intriguing.

Like in the first book, this book has a lot of POV switches, we move from character to character and get their impression of what is happening around them, what they’re involved in and the other characters. Again, I have to say that POV switching is normally something I despise since it forces an almost all-knowing narrator and is often clumsy and repetitive. This isn’t – when the POV shifts it doesn’t rehash what has already been made clear. The POV isn’t used to make grand revelations but nor do we have convoluted situations where characters manage to keep secrets they shouldn’t be able to while we are in their heads. It’s really well written, really finely balanced and really works well. It serves to do an extremely good job of fleshing out all of the characters and making them all strong and with their own agendas.

It also means characters that, in most books, would be relegated to side roles, particularly Edie, don’t. We’re in her head, her viewpoint is as important and powerful as Callie’s – which in turn leads to her having her own story, her own plot line and her own agenda. Even without that, she has her own, clear opinions about Callie, the other characters and the plot that are purely about her, not just as a way to characterise other people. It makes her a major character rather than a support character – which is especially beneficial since she’s a Black woman.

I do think Mark is rather uncharacterised – to a degree that I was surprised by how young he is and had to mentally reset my impression of the character, which means something was missed in the first book, really.

Bitten (The One Rises #1) by Anna Wolfe

Callie’s life has fallen apart. Her best friend was possessed by a demon and slaughtered her friends and her brother – until Callie herself managed to behead the demon (and her friend) while getting bitten in the process, she was then be shipped off to a mental institution for the murder.

Having escaped the institution, Callie had one goal. Kill the man who called the demon in the first place and destroy the book he used. But when she completed the first task, something dark and terrible awoke inside her along with a terrible, evil hunger. Now she has a third task after destroying the book – killing herself for the terrible things she’s done.

But the book proves to be very difficult to destroy and she is found by an organised group of other Bitten who may offer a different path than suicide.

This is a completely original book. It’s totally unlike any other book I’ve read in the genre – we have minor elements that are parallels, but it really is something unique which is pretty precious out of all the books I’ve read so far.

The world is the foundation for this uniqueness. The idea of demons coming through – strange alien creatures that seem to have parallels only in the malice they hold – and biting people, spreading their influence. The Bitten with their demon-wrought abilities have different factions – including the one Callie has fallen in with. Those who try to police their fellows and live as good a life as they can.

It’s fascinating because, despite being self-appointed police, there’s little they can do against the actual Demonridden, or so it seems and there are factions that they must avoid enraging – again, so it seems. I say so it seems because the author has an excellently restrained view of world building. We’re not overwhelmed with details that aren’t relevant but we have plenty of hints to keep us hungry for more. Some information about witches here, some hints about other Bitten there, some allusions to history over here – lots of hints, lots of things to keep me hungry but nothing being stuffed down my throat.

The way the book is written is also extremely well done. We don’t just see things from Callie’s point of view, though she is definitely the protagonist, but also from Silas, Mark and Edie. Normally I hate shifting points of view, I think it tends to be repetitive as each character goes over the same plot points and often stops the protagonist standing out it can also break conflict since we know what everyone is thinking. But this is one of the few times it works – Callie remains firmly the protagonist, but the other characters are excellently fleshed out from the insight inside their heads. It also makes to clear that Mark and Edie aren’t just going to accept Callie and be her servants nor are they going to hate her for no good reason. The side characters who would normally be relegated to after thoughts in the book are fully fleshed out participants, characters in their own right as important as the protagonist herself. I really like it and am impressed that the author managed to pull of this quirk that normally makes me cringe.