Aaaaaaaaaah finally. New job, less time to do things like blog. Ah well, I have plenty of books to review. 🙂 Let’s start with Ilona Andrew’s Magic Bites. This is book one of the Kate Daniels series. In this we are introduced to mercenary Kate Daniels. The book starts with her “fresh” off a case (covered in nasty goo and sewage is not fresh by any means) when she gets word that her old guardian has died. Been murdered actually.

Knowing that he was far too good at being a Knight for the Order of Merciful Aid, Kate knows it had to be a really bad situation. So she knows that she really needs to find who killed him. To do this, she heads down to Atlanta via ley line (convenient and quick but dangerous way to travel). She gets the okay from the Order of Merciful Aid to look into the guy’s death but with the understanding that she’s on her own. They’re not going to provide her back up (despite them really wanting to get revenge as well) but they won’t get in the way either.

Naturally things go wrong from the off. The Masters of the Dead (those who control the empty shell vampires) want her to find the murderer because a number of their vampires have also been brutally murdered (literally torn apart). And of course their natural enemies, the were/shifters, also want the murderer…but neither side wants to cooperate with the other. They’ll cooperate somewhat with Kate but never with each other. In fact, they currently think each other is to blame…with Kate right in the middle. So a bit of a cliche sitch right there but the good writing more than makes up for it.

Kate Daniels is not an investigator. She’s a mercenary. She tracks things down and kills them. Occasionally she bodyguards.  So it isn’t quite out of character for her to be stumbling along trying to fix things and actually doing a bit of bungling from the off. The nice thing about the lead character not being an investigator of some sort (PI, cop, fed etc) is that its harder to for you the reader to figure out the main villain is before the denouement. I love that in a book. I’m the kind of person who figured out the “twist” ending in The Sixth Sense less than half way through the movie. I’m always slightly disappointed if its easy to figure out the big bad in any fantasy book from the get go.

This is a pretty good book to get into the series with but I don’t necessarily think that you need to read it first. Personally, I like reading a book series in order as it tends to make things easier but not always. It introduces you to the main players in this series well enough and gives you a good mystery to boot. The one thing I couldn’t really wrap my head around at this point in the whole series is the Kate/Curran relationship.

I mean, sure, there’s a lot to be said for pure physical/sexual attraction (and boy does Kate fight that every step of the way) but Curran is overbearing as all hell. If a guy in real life treated me the way that Curran treats Kate (or any other woman for that matter), he’d be out on his ass long before sex ever came in the picture. Sure, a strong and confident man is sexy as hell (to me at least) but this guy expects to get his way. In everything. That’s not cool. He doesn’t deserve a woman just because he’s the Beast Lord. That’s creepy and, well, rapey.

Their relationship changes over the course of the series and Curran gets a bit better but he’s still a character I’d like to hit over the head with something and just yell “REALLY?!” right in his face. At any rate, I enjoyed this book (260ish pages in three hours? Yup, liked it). I recommend the series. Rating: A+