August 3

Blood Bound by Patricia Briggs

Reviewed for MonsterLibrarian.com’s Werewolf Month

Ace Fantasy, 2007
ISBN: 9789441914736
Available: New and Used

There’s something almost soothing about Mercy Thompson, mechanic and skinwalker, adopted werewolf and friend to the fae. She’s the kind of urban fantasy heroine who can walk through a door without some sort of power challenge. She keeps a junked out car in the middle of her yard to disturb the local Alpha’s view, “forgets” to tell people things to avoid fights and uses their own training, body language and tempers against them.

In the second book in the series, Mercy’s vampire friend Stefan asks for her help, and ends up dragging her into one of the darkest plots imaginable. Briggs pulls no punches, pitting the almost sweet, barely supernatural Mercy against a demon-possessed vampire whose very presence threatens the emotional control of vampires, humans, werewolves and fae. Mercy has to step up and find the vampire and his maker before more people die, particularly the people she’s come to care about.

Blood Bound is a solid supernatural mystery shot through with veins of true darkness and a collection of odd and intriguing characters. The Mercy Thompson books already have an established audience who should be pleased to find this one included in the library stacks. Recommended to public and private libraries.

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July 30

Demon Inside by Stacia Kane

ISBN: 978-1439155073

Dr. Megan Chase is back, and this time, giving readers very little breathing space, Meg is trying to survive fireball flinging car chases with witches and find out who is, literally, exploding her demons. In the mean time she has to try to come to terms with her own parasitic nature, trying to balance her job as a therapist helping people overcome their trauma, and her soul-calling as the leader of the personal demons, who feed off the pain and emotional hurt of humans.

If that wasn’t bad enough Meg, on the precipice between human and demon, between accepting her own darkness and trying to deny it by helping others deny theirs, gets pulled back into the chaos of the family she walked away from and learns startling, disturbing truths about what made her become the woman she is.

I have to start this one with a purely personal response—I have never read a sex scene that made me cry before this book.

The raw emotional pain of Meg, raised in one of the worse imaginable environments, and struggling to come to terms with that as an adult, even if she tries to hide her coping behind her role as a therapist, is overwhelming. Meg is absolutely compelling as she tries to convince herself that she is a good person, despite dating a demon, being part demon, not to mention a demon queen, and the strange cravings for very inhuman things that begin to overcome her. Her own personal darkness, a textbook example of the damage childhood abuse does to an ordinary person, is delicately, but firmly tied into her struggle with the nature of the demons tied to her.

The level of emotion is incredibly high in this book. It’s hard to stomach, hard to watch and impossible not to experience along with Meg.

But despite the sheer desolation there’s a victorious element, because Megan might not be what her family wants, or what her partners in the practice want, or even what her demon followers want, but what she is under the damage is a core of molten steel trying to survive the inferno of emotions and rise in a world where she can be loved, respected and valued.

Demon Inside isn’t a book for everyone, but for those who connect with Megan because of similar pasts and emotions, it could be the sort of book that unexpectedly changes you and therefore is very highly recommended.


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July 27

Polluto #2

Paperback: 78-0-9550631-3-8

Bizzaro fiction is something of a new experience for me. I’ve read small bits of it before, but it’s not a genre I consider myself well versed in so this is going to be a less neutral review that takes the experiences of an inexperienced reader into account. What I’m looking for in a good weird story is intelligence despite absurdness, a story I’m capable of understanding despite skewing the idea of reality and an emotional response with some aspect of the story.

Polluto # 2, dubbed “Apocalypses & Garden Furniture”, is a hefty collection of tales.

Continue reading

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July 24

Prey by Rachel Vincent

Paperback: 9780778326816, $7.99

With her life no longer at the whims of the werecat alphas, Faythe Saunders, the first female enforcer, and if things work out the first female Alpha in North America, thinks she’ll be able to focus on helping her father face a political battle that started (last book) with his top enforcer and her lover being kicked out of the pack. Instead she finds herself escorting Manx, a female werecat Faythe rescued from a pack of strays who were using her as a breeder, to her own trial for killing her captors. Almost as soon as they step into the Free Area west of the Mississippi river they get caught up in an ambush, and a deep, dark plot that centers on Marc, Faythe’s exiled lover.

With long running series the threat is that readers and the author will become so attached to the characters that the book loses bite as both side don’t want to see harm done to or death of loved characters. But not only does Vincent skirt the edge between independent female lead and anti-baby, anti-family rebel, she holds true to the spirit of the series, which gives no guarantees that everyone will live. Prey is hard forged into a delicate place between gender roles and genres, without ever losing the balance that makes the characters and setting so interesting and compelling. Furthermore the book is nearly 400 pages long, but at the end it’s not going to be enough for readers, leaving off on another cliffhanger. This series far surpasses so many others in terms of each book presenting individual situations and mysteries, yet all the books being so tightly tied together that a marathon reading session would leave very little room to pause.

I can’t ever recall reading a series so tight, so interconnected, before. To top things off there’s definitely a thriller/edge-of-your-seat feel to every book, not to mention a delectable, cliff-hanger end to each volume.

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