Dance, dance and these are the lives you love to lead

And Verity is back! Dominic and Verity have completed their cross-country road trip after leaving Manhattan to avoid any further Covenant activity with time for a quickie wedding stop in Vegas, and are back at Verity’s family compound in Oregon. They aren’t home for long before Verity gets an email from the producer of Dance or Die, the reality TV competition she participated in, and upon calling, she is invited back for reunion season that would involve the top 4 from the first five seasons.  While Verity chose the family business over dance in Manhattan, she does still feel like there is some unfinished business with her dance career, and it might actually raise more attention if she doesn’t participate in the reunion given all the other competitors’ return.  As a result, Valerie Pryor is back in LA, with a new boyfriend in tow to find out once and for all if she is a good enough dancer.

While Verity enjoys being back in this other life temporarily, she realizes it is not the life she wants.  However, when she and the two cryptid dancers of the show discover that each week’s eliminations are actually being killed, staying on the show takes on even more importance since it is the only way she can continue to investigate and save her fellow competitors.  Once she realizes that her two lives are crossing, her family sends her grandmother Alice for help.

Each novel has added to the extended family and/or provided more details on the family history.  For example, Midnight Blue-Light Special introduced Uncle Mike, and Grandma Angela. The third novel involved more interactions with Grandma Angela and introduced her husband Martin, a Revenant (think Frankenstein’s monster).  The one exception has been Pocket Apocalypse, and that’s because it introduced the entirety of Shelby’s family.  In this case, the reader finally gets to meet the much talked about Alice, who like her granddaughter, fell in love with a Covenant man, ended up turning him away from the Society and marrying him. Based on some weird magic dealings, Thomas Price disappeared into another dimension and Alice has been searching for him ever since leading to some rather odd aging. In fact, Alice came because she can easily go undercover as Verity’s younger sister.

As usual, it’s the characters and all the family details that set this apart and make it such a fun novel. I wish someone paid as much attention to the timeline details when it came to the family history though; some of the throwaway comments don’t always make sense from a date perspective when compared to the family tree and its dates. Despite my nitpicks, I am thoroughly enjoying this series, especially given the ending of this one, and the potential opportunities it presents for the novels moving forward.