Broken by Kelley Armstrong

Elena is the only female werewolf. Werewolves are either born with the gene – and it’s only passed to boys – or bitten, and women usually die. Except Elena. Elena was Bitten but she lived.

The pregnancy is troubling – there has never been a pregnant werewolf as there are no other female werewolves, so no one knows what to expect. Because of this, Elena is confined to her home. It would be an understatement to say she was bored witless, so when something comes up that requires her expertise – and seems harmless – she jumps at it.

Of course, it isn’t harmless. Elena inadvertently opens a time portal those sets a serial killer and two zombies loose in Toronto. Elena, Clay and Jeremy stay in Toronto to try to send the serial killer and his zombies back. Along the way, they ask Zoe, a vampire, and Jaime, the necromancer, for help. For some reason, the serial killer and his zombies are targeting Elena specifically. The Pack and its friends have to find out why and what to do to close the time portal.

This wasn’t my favorite Elena book because I am not all that thrilled with the idea of a “hell portal.” Given that this is a series about all kinds of supernatural creatures that don’t exist, I don’t know why this particular thing is the one that is “too much” for me. I just didn’t grab me. If you’re already a fan of WOW, then by all means, read this. If you aren’t, don’t start here! Go back to the beginning. You’ll enjoy this more if you’re already familiar with Elena and Clay and the rest.
The ending is nearly saccharine but the reader – at least this reader – can’t help but cheer for Elena and Clay.

Haunted by Kelley Armstrong

Eve Levine is a ghost. In Industrial Magic she makes a deal with The Fates and, if Paige and Lucas are returned to life, she’ll owe The Fates a favor. Now they’ve decided to call it in.

What they want seems to be impossible. The Nix, a demi-demon, has accidentally been let loose in the world. For, oh, several hundred years. She’s been nearly caught but has escaped. Eve’s task is to track her down and bring her in, so to speak. She’s scared witless but she isn’t alone: she has the help of Kris (who is her daughter’s father and the love of her life) and Tsriel, an angel.

The Afterlife, according to these books, is very different from what most of us think of as “Heaven.” Eve encounters various things: a pirate’s enclave and a school for poltergeists, for example. There is a version of what hell must be like but, in this case, was reserved for the worst among us: serial killers and like that.

The story goes back and forth between Nix and Eve, which can get confusing. I had to look back a few times to remember who this person or that person was. I have to say, as you can probably tell by the lackluster thoughts here, I didn’t really care for this book. I am a big fan of Armstrong’s but this one just didn’t thrill me.

On the plus side, we see more of Savannah, of Paige and Lucas (who got married between Industrial Magic and Haunted) and Jaime. Since Jaime is going to have her own book coming up, that’s a good thing.

Industrial Magic by Kelley Armstrong

I’m always thrilled when I find a new writer who a) I think is amazing; b) who is writing a series, because I love series; c) there are several books to the series before I find them; and d) whose writing gets better with each book. That describes Kelley Armstrong perfectly

Industrial Magic is the second book narrated by Paige Winterborne, a witch. In this book, she and her boyfriend, sorcerer Lucas, are asked by Lucas’ father (a powerful Sorcerer leader) to investigate why supernatural teens are being murdered.

Lucas’ father, Benicio Cortez, is the leader of the Cortez Cabal, which is sort of like a mafia family. They appear to be a major corporation from the outside, but the inside is an entirely different story. Lucas has refused his position as heir to the Cortez Cabal and is trying to do his best to put an end to the cabals across the country. Difficult task, that. Probably impossible. That mission is put aside, though, as Lucas and Paige investigate the murders of the teenage supernaturals.

Along the way, Paige tries to create an alternative coven, since she was kicked out of her previous coven. She tries to convince witches who aren’t already part of a coven that a virtual coven can be good for them. Witches aren’t known for being open to change, even the younger ones or the ones who are outside the covens in general.

Industrial Magic is suspenseful yet is character-driven, there a couple of new characters that you’ll enjoy and one thing that is highly implausible – but then isn’t the entire concept?

Dimestore Magic by Kelley Armstrong

This, along with the next book, are my favorites of the Women of the Otherworld series. There is going to be a new one out this year with these characters, Waking the Witch, which is mostly about Savannah, and I can’t wait to read it.

But back to Dime Store Magic.

In this book, we revisit Paige and Savannah from Stolen, as well as Leah.  Paige is a witch who is, at a very young age, Coven Leader because her mother died.  Savannah is a very powerful and very young witch whose birth father, a sorcerer, is trying to get her from Paige, for some reason.

Paige is a good witch, the leader of other good witches who are so afraid of being exposed to the nonmagical world that they have seriously limited the magic that they are allowed to do and remain in the coven. Being part of a coven is crucial for a witch’s well-being. Paige wants to modernize the coven, bring them into the 21st century, so to speak, but they are resistant. To say the least.

Paige is a reluctant guardian to Savannah, but she takes her responsibilities seriously. Savannah needs to be protected from her sorcerer-father and others who think that she is a dark witch, so Paige does everything in her power to protect the child. To do so, she needs help from Leah (a half-demon) and from a most unlikely source – Lucas Cortez, a sorcerer and son of the leader of the Cortez Cabal. Witches and sorcerers have long been enemies, so Paige is suspicious of Lucas but still accepts his help.

Dime Store Magic is urban fantasy at its best but it is also a love story. Unlike many books of this genre, the love story isn’t lurid or graphic and, while it is secondary, it written well enough that you are just as engaged in that as the action part of the story.

You don’t have to have read any of the previous books to enjoy Dime Store Magic. All of the WOW books are stand-alone, though for some of them, I think it helps to have read previous books. In this case, though, it makes little difference if you’ve read the previous two books.

Do you read Kelley Armstrong? What’s your favorite of her books?

Stolen by Kelley Armstrong

Have I said that I *really* like this series.  This was so well-written.  Essentially, someone is capturing supernaturals to study them for some reason.  Elena – the werefwolf from Bitten – is captured.  The story revolves around her experiences and then her attempt to escape and what happens next.

We also meet the main characters of the next books.  Armstrong is good about that – she sets up the next book by introducing the narrator in the current book, so we have some idea who the person is.

This isn’t my favorite of the WOW series, but it was still very good.

Bitten by Kelley Armstrong

I recently reviewed the latest in the Women of the Otherworld series, Tales of the Otheworld, so I decided to go back and review the rest of the series. This is the first of them.

Elena is a “mutt” – a werewolf without a Pack. Well, she has a Pack but she left them to try to live as normal a human life as possible. It’s harder than you might think when she has to Change regularly. Oh, not every full moon as some books would have you believe but frequently enough.

Then, Pack members start getting killed and Elena goes home to try to help. Things progress from there. Elena has several fairly startling – to her – revelations along the way.

This is the first of the series and I was captured immediately. I love Elena and, in future books, I’m always happy when she shows up. She is friends with Paige, who has a couple of books of her own, so we see Elena in those as well.

Armstrong is very good at creating a world so real that you forget that werewolves don’t, in fact, exist. I highly recommend Bitten to anyone who is a fan of urban fantasy. Armstrong is one of my favorite authors, if not my absolute favorite. You can count on anything she writes being a book you have to take an entire afternoon/evening to read because you won’t be able to put it down. Thank goodness I read fast!

Kitty Goes to War by Carrie Vaughn

This book isn’t due out until June 29, 2010, but thanks to Renee at Renee’s Book Addiction, I got an advanced reading copy. As soon as it comes out, you should go buy it immediately!

Kitty gets a call from the new director at the NIH’s Center for the Study of Paranatural Biology. It seems an Army captain has created his own unit – by making werewolves. He was a werewolf himself and he knew that gave him an advantage. Unfortunately, he was blown up in combat, which left his unit without an alpha. They knew little, if anything, about being a werewolf and how to stay healthy and sane so they aren’t in the best of mental health. One of the remaining weres began killing the others. The director of the CSPB asks Kitty for help in determining if these soldiers can be rehabiliated.

There are other things going on in Kitty’s world. For one thing, she is being sued by the owner of a major corporation. For libel. She did a show about how strange things were happening at his stores and the next thing she knows, she’s being sued for libel. Cormac is out of prison and behaving weirdly, leaving both Kitty and Ben (her husband, who is Cormac’s cousin) quite worried about him.

Kitty Goes to War is the best of the Kitty books to date. The title is slightly misleading as Kitty never actually goes to war herself. Still, she does help veterans who served in Afghanistan. If you think about what you know – or have heard – about vets returning from war and add to that the difficulties with being a werewolf and learning to deal with it, you can imagine why these guys were a bit unbalanced.

Kitty is one of my favorite characters. She’s a strong woman – she has to be to be alpha of a werewolf pack. She is also vulnerable at times and, though she doesn’t show her pack her weakness, we get to see it. So many female leads who are tough don’t have much of a softer side. I think no character should be so one-sided.

Vaughn keeps the reader engaged from start to finish. There are no boring bits in her book, nothing I skipped over. She sets the reader up for future books by implying (as she has in previous books) that there is a larger story coming – sort of a “good vs. evil” war with the supernaturals that, of course, the humans will be clueless about. I’m curious to see what happens in book nine.

Tales of the Otherworld by Kelley Armstrong

I love the Women of the Otherworld series and this is an excellent addition to the mix.

When Armstrong began her career, she wanted to do something to thank her readers so she put free fiction on her website. Readers loved it but they asked her “When will they be in a book?” Armstrong waited until she could do it with a charitable project, which she did with Men of the Otherworld. Tales of the Otherworld is the second collection of eight short stories and all of the proceeds from the sale of the book will go to World Literacy of Canada, which is “dedicated to promoting international development and social justice.”

The first story, Rebirth, tells the story of how Aaron became a vampire. I have to tell you that I didn’t know who Aaron was until I read the last story of the book. I really need to reread some of the earlier books and make notes so I can keep track of all of the characters! Aaron is the second in command of the north American vampires, working with Cassandra. It’s quite a short story so to tell you more would give away too much. Let’s just say Aaron wasn’t that excited about being a vampire.

Bewitched is the story of how Eve met and fell in love with Kristof, thus producing Savannah. And, how it came to be that Kristof didn’t know about Savannah until after Eve died. Dime Store Magic and Industrial Magic are my favorite of the entire series, so I was happy to see this one included. I always thought there had to be more to Eve and Kristof than we first thought.

Birthright is Logan’s story. At least the story of how he came to the Pack. He was raised with his mother and never knew anything about his father until, on his 18th birthday, he receives a letter with nothing more than the name of Jeremy Danvers and his address. Logan assumes that Jeremy is his father and, despite the changes he is going through, never suspects that he is a werewolf. Just as his father must have wanted – Logan has a lot to learn and now he has someone to teach him and give him a place in the werewolf world.

All of us who are fans of Women of the Otherworld know that Clay bit Elena and that is how she became a werewolf. What we didn’t know is what Beginnings is all about. As the name suggests, it’s the beginning of their relationship. This is one of the longest of the stories, which makes sense as Elena and Clay have a long history. Elena is a college student when she meets Clay – who is a visiting professor. For reasons he can’t explain, he gives her a job when he doesn’t need an assistant and, gradually, they develop a relationship. Elena has been in foster care most of her life so she is slow to trust and slower to love, but eventually she does love and trust Clay. Clay, however, hasn’t told Elena that he is a werewolf, so there is some tension.

As it’s not a secret that Clay bit Elena, I will tell you this: it wasn’t premeditated, it was an impulse. He’d taken Elena home to meet Jeremy, thinking that once Jeremy saw that Clay had met his mate, then Jereamy would lift the ban on long-term relationships. Clay and Elena got engaged and almost no one in the Pack knew about her. Jeremy isn’t happy about it and when Clay thinks that Jeremy is going to send Elena on her way, he bit her.

The short story pretty much ends there but the rest of it is in the early book, Bitten and more is told along the way in the other books that feature Elena and Clay as well as in Men of the Otherworld.

Expectations is a quick & dirty version of Lucas Cortez’s first meeting with Eve Levine and the lessons she teaches him.

Given that we read the beginning of Clay and Elena’s relationship just a few pages earlier, Ghosts was sort of disconcerting as it takes place after Clay and Elena are married. Jeremy, the lead of this story, also has memories of Elena just after she is bitten, so it gets a little confusing. In this story, though, Jeremy is dealing with a potential challenger for Alpha and facing the consequences of some of his choices as Alpha.

Wedding Bell Hell features my favorites: Paige Winterbourne, Lucas Cortez and Savannah Levine. Paige and Lucas are getting married and being supernatural does not mean that things always go smoothly – or that Lucas’ father will not try to highjack the wedding and turn it into what *he* thinks it should be. Eventually, though, they do end up married – Paige and Lucas, that is – and no one’s father is harmed in the doing of it.

The Case of El Chupacabra is the first nonprequel novella that Armstrong wrote. It also features my favorite witches and sorcerer, along with Cassandra and Aaron, the werewolf from the first story.

Sean Nast is in a gay bar when he finds a body – and the man appears to have been killed by a vampire. He hires Lucas Cortez to find out what happened, hoping to keep his own name out of the press and to keep his family from finding out he’s gay.

Benicio Cortez, Lucas’ father, is intent on getting Lucas to join the family business, which Lucas is dead set against. They finally come up with a solution that will make both Lucas and Benicio happy.

Sean struggles with coming out and eventually does come out to his uncle. Unfortunately, he does not get a positive response. I have to say, the struggles that Sean has with coming out are fairly realistic. It’s easy to say “you should come out!” (and, for the record, I believe you should) but the actual doing of it can be tricky and there are frequently consequences. A person has to be prepared for them. Sean seems determined to find a way to reconcile his personal and professional lives and to be his own man, regardless of how difficult that might be.

The next book (due out in August) is Waking the Witch, which features Savannah, who is Sean’s half-sister. I suspect we are going to be seeing more of Sean in that book, as he is the only Nast who acknowledges Savannah.

Silver Borne by Patricia Briggs

I can always count on Patricia Briggs to write a story that I have to read from start to finish – without stopping! Silver Borne is a perfect example of that.

Mercy always seems to find herself in dicey situations. She’s a coyote shapeshifter mated to the werewolf Alpha, which sort of makes her Alpha female by default & the werewolves aren’t all happy about that. She has friends who are prone to getting into trouble and in Silver Borne, of course someone does exactly that.

Mercy’s friend Phin loans Mercy a book and then disappears. He sends her a message via a mutual friend to “take care of the thing I gave her.” Mercy knows the only thing is the book, so she tries to find Phin – which is how she finds out he has gone missing. She hides the book and then tries to find out what happened to her friend.

While she’s busy with that, her long-time friend, Samuel, who is a werewolfe, tries to kill himself. As werewolves age they sometimes lose control of themselves and Samuel is afraid of that. He also feels that he has no place in the world and that his work, as a doctor, doesn’t really help anyone. Sounds more like basic loneliness to me. In any event, Samuel’s wolf takes over and Mercy has to hide him. If it becomes known that the wolf is in charge, the powers that be (namely Mercy’s mate and the Marrok – sort of the President of the werewolves) will kill him.

Along the way, Mercy gets into and out of trouble, someone tries to set Adam up to be killed, the mother of Mercy’s teenage employee – Gabriel – refuses to let him work there any more and, oh, yeah, someone in the Pack is trying to get rid of Mercy.

What I love about the Mercy series is how Mercy herself, I guess. She’s someone I would want to know – except that she would drive me to drink! Such a good heart but so stubborn and not trusting. As the series goes along, Mercy is developing more fully as a woman and she is learning to trust not only Adam but herself. And the Pack.

Every time a new Mercy book comes out, I want to re-read the entire series so I can remember who everyone is relative to everyone else. The downside to reading as much as I do is that I get fuzzy on the details. I have a sister who can remember every single character and their significance in each of the 1000-page + books in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series. I’m lucky to remember the main characters and the primary secondaries! These books are so good, though, that I want to remember who everyone is and how they relate to Mercy because I root for Mercy and I want to know who is on her side and who isn’t.

If you haven’t read any of the rest of the series, I highly recommend that you begin at the beginning with Moon Called. This book can be enjoyed if you have no background because Briggs is excellent at filling in details but I think that having the background will make things make more sense.

The Diva Paints the Town by Krista Davis

This was a hard book to write about. The story was okay and only okay. I enjoyed the previous two books of this series but this was not my favorite. The storylines seemed disjointed and I never got caught up in the whodunit this time. I just didn’t seem to care.

Sophie really needs to get over this patheticness with Wolf. Am I the only woman in the world who is direct and would just ask what the hell was going on? I know I am not. I’m not sure why Sophie doesn’t just check things out.

The fourth book in this series, The Diva Cooks a Goose, presumably a Christmas story, is due out in December 2010.