Night Life

Generally I enjoyed this one, although it did have some flaws. Good points: The main character was admittedly another example in a long line of sarcastic female lead characters in urban fantasy yet was still quite likeable despite the use of this trope. The plot was gripping and flowed quite well. The world building was interesting (I enjoyed the descriptions of the city and its problems, as well as the conflict between the supernatural and non supernatural, for instance.) The other characters were also well drawn.

Bad points: One aspect which seemed to me to be particularly problematic in this novel (and which did eventually result in my reducing the rating I assigned this book from 4 to 3 stars) was the way in which various elements were left unresolved at the end of the novel, presumably to be deal with in future novels. I can accept an underlying arc in a series of novels. It does seem to me however that this needs to be done in such a way that certain fundamental and more immediate story elements are resolved within each installment -otherwise this tends to leave the reader with the feeling that things have been intentionally left hanging so as to rope them into reading the next book. I speak of the difference between having an underlying continuing story and having the end of the story essentially truncated. Unfortunately, the end of this novel fell into the latter category, IMHO. One example of this is a character named Regan Lockhart. For part of the novel, he seemed to me to be the most frightening character in the book and was presented as the most likely suspect in the murders being investigated. Yet by the end of the novel, nothing much is learned about him Why the murders occured is never dealt with, meaning that what the reader knows by the end of the book can be summarized as follows.

A blood witch wanted power ('cause that's what blood witches tend to want, apparently?) and killed a bunch of women to raise a demon. The end.

Nothing much is explained about Lockhart. Nothing much is said about any potential consequences of the attack on the main character by another group of blood witches earlier in the novel (the main character is a cop, which makes this somewhat unbelievable, IMHO). Nothing much is explained about the apparently special nature of the demon raised by the aforementioned evil blood witch, nothing much (one line at the end the novel!) is said about how all the policemen who cooperated with the blood witch are to be dealt with (something is mentioned about Internal Affairs and it seems the main character is suddenly back on the force), nothing is put forth to explain why or how so many veteran police officers were working for this blood witch (other than the fact that this witch was also a lawyer and DA, which does not seem to me to be much of an explanation).

Do you begin to see my point?

The second unsuccessful aspect involved the love interest of the main character (i.e. Dmitri). I can accept the idea of the main character's love interest having been involved in crime. What I had more difficulty with was the first 'love' (insert full irony here) scene between the main character and Dmitri. While it was evident that the author was going for a scene that was edgy and which fit the characters who are both rather cynical, this did not work for me. In particular, the scene is quite rough with more than one mention of her feeling pain, as well as the fact that they both shifted partially during the act such that his organ became larger and hurt her (I believe the phrase was something along the lines of 'feeling as if she was a virgin').

And yet she has an orgasm. Eeep. And ouch.

What doesn't work here is that it simply is not clear enough that the main character felt *pleasure*. So while I would not say that there were issues with dubious consent on her part, it was certainly not clear that she enjoyed this, except for the orgasm which almost felt 'tacked on' to the end of the scene. (This is just my 0.02$, since I think that if one writes a sex scene, one should aim to write it well.)

The third and final aspect which was somewhat problematic to my mind was the fact that the main character did not seem to realize or care that her sarcasm and lack of tact could and probably did hurt the people around her: I can accept a character having had a hard life and being hardened by this. I can also heartily accept her being ready and willing to tell off those people around her who deserve it. What I have more difficulty with however is the fact that she generally seemed relatively oblivious to the fact that her words and her attitude could hurt and were wrong. (She did occasionally apologize to her cousin, for instance, but did not seem to have that much respect for her, despite the fact that her cousin truly tried to be there for her.) She was still a likeable character, but this was a little incongruous with the rest of the story and character.

I have to say that I did enjoy this book, and thought that the story seems like what would actually happen in the world if weres/witches/etc did exist (riots, slums, etc..). I found that to be quite refreshing in a book of this nature. This book also read very much like a police/crime thriller, so if you like those, and you like fantasy, you probably will enjoy this book.

I am all about the kick ass characters so I really enjoyed this one. I thought the whole Insoli thing was a new twist on the lone wolf premis. The romance was also good...not too steamy for those of us who enjoy more foreplay than down right dirty :)

So meet Luna Wilder, were and detective. She is currently having a hard time keeping her temper from lashing out, and the case she lands does not help. Luna has to find out who is killing people all over town. Her first suspect is an alpha were by the name of Dmitri, and his temper is actually worse than hers! Luna calls in her roommate and cousin, Sunny, who is a witch herself for some advice. Turns out that Luna is also part of a witch line, but did not get any of the magic. Not that she would need it since she was turned into a were from an ex-boyfriend. Luna and Dmitri have to try and play nice to find out who is the witch is that is killing everyone before he kills his seventh victim. If he gets to seven, then the witch can bring forth a daemen.

It was a good start to a new series. It was a little darker than the books I usually read, but I did enjoy it. I did find that every time I thought Luna could not longer be beaten up or called nasty names, it happened again. It was a little repetitive in that sense.