In part two of Carlson's Blooded series, the only female werewolf in the world is on a mission to rescue her mate, a werecat (of an as yet unidentified genus) with barely a cameo role in this installment. She's fighting a powerful goddess and there are stakes beyond saving her dude, like preventing a war between supernatural sects.
When the first-ever female werewolf is born, the boys are not excited to share their toys with her. There's even some legend about a female wolf causing the destruction of werekind. Dudes can be so lame!
Even though this tale of four women in their late thirties is strictly an extra sexed-up romance novel that's not particularly compelling and has some weird quasi-feminist politics, I stuck with it because I like stories about people who are different from me. One of the characters is Jewish, but of the other three, two are Black and one is Colombian, but what makes their lives even more noticeably different than mine is that they're all filthy rich.
Six years later, she no longer dated snakes; she accessorized with them. She had a brilliant career, her dignity, and a closet full of reptile purses--the spoils of her victory over herself.
Somehow I didn't realize at first that this book has two novels in one volume. I was relieved when I got to the end of Glass Houses halfway through the thick book. As far as teen paranormal fiction goes, GH is less compelling and believable (you know what I mean, that the unbelievable has a logic to it that makes sense) than some others of its genre. It's also different from many others of its ilk in that the vampires are all for-real bad guys.
Attempting to fill the void left by her Newsflesh Trilogy, Mira Grant gives us another near-future made dystopic by a health cure gone wrong. This first entry in the Parasitology series brings us likeable characters, a quasi-believable medical threat (though to be honest far less plausible than how she envisioned zombies), corrupt business practices, mad egomaniacal scientists, strained family relationships and two sweet dogs.
It's weird when a book takes place in a neighborhood you know incredibly well, but is in a universe you've heard about but don't recognize, populated by alcoholic, bigoted police officers. Buried on Avenue B has a second location, Sarasota, Florida, which is not far from Tampa, where I went to grad school. The people in the Publix grocery stores in Sarasota are depicted as nicer than the ones I encountered in Tampa, but there was one commonality--old men bagging groceries. De Jonge assumes they're doing it for the minimum wage. In my naivete, I want to believe it is for something to do.
You know I love the Sookie Stackhouse series, right?, but like with so many endings to television series, the finale was a bit of a disappointment. I'm okay with who Sookie ended up with, but the whole book was a set-up for it, and there were lots of loose ends unnecessarily tied up.
With my read of book eleven of the Hollows series, I've logged enough time with Rachel Morgan that I'll probably stay with her indefinitely. That's why I stuck with this entry, even though it was pretty far off the rails with lots of mystical shit like balancing ley lines and detecting aura signatures.
Sloan Skye is a summer intern at the FBI. She got bumped from the Behavior Analysis Unit to the Paranormal Behavior Analysis Unit, a joke of a new department. They're tracking a vampire serial killer, but Skye doesn't believe in the supernatural. Of course she gets disabused of that notion, but it takes longer than you might hope.
Vampires, werewolves, elves and lawyers are the dangerous creatures in this new series by Phillipa Bornikova (a pen name, so readers don't get confused between this and Snodgrass's sf novels). It's a fine read, though sometimes surprisingly amateurish for such a veteran writer. There are also typos and misspellings that the editors should have caught, like George M. "Cohen" for "Cohan" and "vise" for "vice," or the overuse of the word "saliva." (Four times denoting the narrator's hunger "Saliva burst in my mouth..." and only once a vampire's fangs.) So not to seem entirely petty, let me say that I like the protagonist because she's short.