Magic Rises (Kate Daniels #6) by Ilona Andrews

via Goodreads, click to see more info.

Rated it: 5 Stars

Recommends it to: Generally the Young Adult crowd into the urban fantasy realm. If you liked The Edge series (haven’t read it yet myself), chances are you might like this one as well.

GR blurb

Mercenary Kate Daniels and her mate, Curran, the Beast Lord, are struggling to solve a heartbreaking crisis. Unable to control their beasts, many of the Pack’s shapeshifting children fail to survive to adulthood. While there is a medicine that can help, the secret to its making is closely guarded by the European packs, and there’s little available in Atlanta.

Kate can’t bear to watch innocents suffer, but the solution she and Curran have found threatens to be even more painful. The European shapeshifters who once outmaneuvered the Beast Lord have asked him to arbitrate a dispute—and they’ll pay him in medicine. With the young people’s survival and the Pack’s future at stake, Kate and Curran know they must accept the offer—but they have little doubt that they’re heading straight into a trap…

My review

A slight spoiler is in here somewhere

I think this might possibly be the best book in the series. Not only because this wasn’t happening in Atlanta but half way around the world made me pause; it could be either really good or disastrous, because they’re going to be way out of their territory so any crap can happen but that made the prospect of reading this even more exciting. It was awesome.

Punctuated with the much loved smart-mouth remarks, Kate, Curran and Co. sail across the Black Sea on body guard duty. Having no choice on the matter really, they agree to a contract drawn up where in exchange of protecting the werewolf mother-to-be Dessandra in exchange for the precious panacea, a substance capable of drastically reducing the probability of young shifters falling prey to loupism. Dessandra though, oh my goodness, that woman is a case by herself, complex and at times pitiful (and I suspect that’s on purpose) but certainly not stupid.

Advertisement

Masques (Shifter’s Wolf Pt.1) by Patricia Briggs

via Goodreads.com

Rated it: 3½ stars      Recommend it to: Fans of the fantasy genre; shape shifters, period fantasy novels.

This is my second review of Masques (if you’re curious this is the first)

I was excited to read a couple of the first books by Patricia Briggs, a natural compulsion being I’m a fan of her Mercy Thompson series. Basically Shifter’s Wolf is an anthology, Masques and Wolfsbane both set in a fictional realm of a mercenary and spy from Sianim and her enigmatic companion, Wolf.

Mrs. Briggs did mention that it might not meet up to her current standard of writing that her recent readers are accustomed to since she was, obviously, a novice back then. The books went out of print until lately and she didn’t want to change anything from the original plot, only to brush up and polish what was there so that their first readers can come back to something familiar and for us, the new lot, so we won’t find it terribly juvenile. I think that’s very thoughtful and sweet of her.

Moon Called (Mercy Thompson #1) by Patricia Briggs

via goodreads

Rated: 5 stars                  I recommend this to: pretty much everyone, esp. UF fans.

Originally read: October 8th, 2011

This is the second time I’ve read this and my oh my was it an eye opener. In the previous review I think I stated that I felt like everything seemed stuffy, which loosely translates that I didn’t really have an idea what the dickens was going on in the most crucial scenes. Heh, I wonder how it is, or why for that matter, that I continued to the second book in the series. Now with a fresher pair of eyes and a broader frame of mind I actually got in on the action.

Mercedes Thompson isn’t your average VW mechanic. Does yours regularly service a Mystery Machine replica owned by a Scooby Doo fanatic who happens to be a hot vampire, works with an iron mage and lives over the fence to the local alpha’s house? I didn’t think so. Oh, and she turns into a coyote. I really like her, I mean she could be a badass but she knows where to draw the line.She may be physically inferior(which might be too strong a word) but she makes up for it in mouthing off to authority and those above her ,but hey I can’t blame her with all of those overbearing werewolves around, she had to stand up for herself.

Mercy’s an okay gal, she’s tough, funny, caring and doesn’t like to be out of the line of fire when she knows that she could be helping.She doesn’t have tons of magic (or any of it so to speak)so that she could just wriggle her pinkie and WAM leveling the street with vampires, nope,that’s what makes me like her even more, she relies on her instincts and quick thinking rather than power.