4.5 stars
This is book five in a series, and most definitely not the best place to start. Begin with Dead Witch Walking, and possibly skip this review if you don’t want spoilers for earlier books in the series.
There are dead werewolf women turning up in the morgue, apparently having committed suicide. Someone else appears to be murdering werewolves after keeping them tied up, and after some investigation, independent runner and calamity-prone witch Rachel Morgan is pretty sure she knows what the connection between all the deaths is. During her last adventure, she retrieved an ancient and very powerful werewolf artifact, and she suspects someone may be killing people to figure out its whereabouts.
The artifact, valuable enough to spark a war among the supernaturals of Cincinnati, is currently hidden with her friend, lone wolf David Hue, but she’s worried that he may be in danger if the wrong people connect the artifact back to her. In addition to this, Rachel’s sometime nemesis, councilman and secret bio-druglord Trent Kalamack offers to pay her a truly staggering sum of money to work security at his wedding. Since the best man is going to be Lee Saladan, who both Rachel and Trent know is a demon’s familiar, chances are high that something bad is going to go down during the ceremony and Trent still blames Rachel for Saladan becoming caught by the demon in the first place. Neither of them have any idea just how complicated Saladan’s presence at the wedding would actually become.
Rachel knows Trent is marrying to form an alliance, as there really aren’t all that many suitable elves around. She also knows he’s working on a genetic cure to make it easier for elves to actually have children, and is starting to feel guilty about the fact that she’s been keeping the existence of Ceri, an elf from the dark ages, and the demon Algaliarept’s former familiar, hidden from Trent. A genetic sample from her could massively improve Trent’s chances of helping the elven race survive.
In her personal life, Rachel is still figuring out whether she can ever let her roommate Ivy, a living vampire, bite her again, seeing as she nearly ended up dead the last time. At the same time, she is wondering about her future with Kisten, another living vamp. Because Ivy has feelings for Rachel, she won’t accept anyone else taking her blood, and while Rachel is rather terrified of any vamp feeding on her, her feelings for Kisten are growing, and she wants a new level of intimacy with him. On top of everything else, Rachel is coming to see that both Ivy and Jenks are probably right about her being an adrenaline junkie, never quite happy unless she’s near to risking her life, just to feel properly alive. She’s about to see just how dangerous those impulses can get.
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