Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

For those of us who read the "kickass female hunter of supernatural whatever" genre, you know that more and more authors have been jumping on this bandwagon, authors who seem to think that as long as you include pages and pages of expository sex between the heroine and the creatures-du-jour then they've created an "urban fantasy". Thankfully, this author has concentrated on actually providing us with both a complex heroine and complex secondary characters - none of whom immediately fall into each others beds or bodies. Not to mention creating an intriguing storyline, set in one of the genre's favorite places, New Orleans. She's created an interesting universe involving a vampire society that coexists with the human world, and a heroine who is not what she seems on the surface, and whose personal history is still partially a mystery to her as well as us. People get hurt and people die in this story. Not everyone is what they seem, or fits the heroine's mental stereotypes. This was one of those books that when I picked it up, I couldn't put it down until I finished it. I bought into the world that the author created and I began to care about the characters. I liked Jane Yellowrock because although she's self-assured on the surface, she retains a vulnerability because her past history is veiled to her, and she doesn't know how old she is or where she lived or what happened to her biological family. She also has the added burden of knowing that the action that allowed her to live beyond her normal life span was the result of inadvertent black magic - something that horrifies her conscience. I appreciated the fact that while the male characters in the story were attractive to, and attracted to Jane, that's as far as it went in this book. The author apparently understands that anticipation and mental fantasies are more intriguing to a reader than immediate wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am consummation of sexual attraction. I am really looking forward to the next book in this series.