Karen Chance
Touch the Dark (2006)
Cassandra is a clairvoyant who is on the run from her former vampire master. After she receives a death notice on her computer, she flees, taking only her gun from her office, and stopping only to warn her roommate that there is danger coming, and he shouldn't go home.
First things first, there is boinking in this book. Boinking in detail. So you've been warned if that's not your thing.
Aside from the boinking, however, there were some interesting questions in story. Why were the vampires after Cassandra? What would make a clairvoyant so important? What did the Vampire Senate really want from Cassandra?
The story also raises the question, what is it about vampires that people find so erotic? At best, they're parasites. At worst, cold killers. Plus, they're dead. So how come they can still (ahem) function? These aren't really questions that relate specifically to Touch the Dark, but rather questions about the current fascination with vampires. (And I'm as guilty as anyone else here, which is why I'm so curious about the whole thing.)
The story is interesting, and it did go places that I wasn't expecting. However, some of the things I found slightly confusing. For instance, mucking about with the time line seems like a really bad idea. Even if there does seem to be some sort of magic attempting to keep the future from changing.
The pace of the story is fast, which is good. It's nice to be able to read a story in a couple of hours, and still have time left in the day to do other things. Plus I am not sure that most supernatural stories would hold up under a slower pace. Part of what makes them good is the desire to keep flipping the pages to find out what happens. A slower pace might leave one with more time to consider the plot, and things like why mucking about in the timeline doesn't wreak more havoc.
The characters are interesting, but the ones I found most interesting were really part of the supporting cast. It's one thing to make vampires sexy and hot, it's something else entirely to make them interesting without resorting to sex appeal. She did a good job of making the characters of Rafe and Billy quite interesting, without having to resort to sex appeal. And it's interesting that although she describes vampires as having the same range of appearance as humans, the majority of vampires she interacts with are described as very good looking.
Although the story arc is resolved, there are plenty of questions left open, and I presume a sequel is planned. So the resolution was good, but not great. (And after a quick check, I am correct. A sequel comes out in April.)
So it's an interesting story with some flaws, but for a quick read it's pretty good, and has potential to get more interesting.
Rating: 7/10
Claimed by Shadow (2007)
This book left me feeling...annoyed.
I went and checked, and here's how I summed up Touch the Dark:
(I)t's an interesting story with some flaws, but for a quick read it's pretty good, and has potential to get more interesting.
Well, unfortunately, it didn't get more interesting. I mostly found myself annoyed with Cassie, and tired of the fact the she was constantly surrounded by hunky, gorgeous guys. Please. It's as if absolutely everything in this story related in one way or another to sex. Either Cassie thinking about sex or sizing up every guy some comes across as a potential partner for boinking. Even when she was in danger she couldn't stop thinking about sex.
Whatever.
There were some interesting fantasy elements in this story. I particularly liked the tattoos--the idea that with magic you could create tattoos that were more than works of art--they could act as offensive or defensive weapons. But in implementation, they were inconsistent. Sometimes they seemed incredibly powerful and other times they seemed incredibly worthless. Of course that goes for Cassie's powers as well.
Good cover though. I loved the color and use of shadow and the dress and everything.
I also found the "major" death to be unsatisfactory as well. If you're going to kill someone off then be brave and kill of a major character--not someone you've brought it solely for the purpose of giving the heroine cool new toys/powers and then dying valiantly sacrificing themselves for the winsome heroine.
Even the secondary characters that I enjoyed in the first book seemed flatter and more annoying in this book.
If you read Touch the Dark, then you may want to read Claimed by Shadow, to see where the story is going. But I'd recommend picking it up used.
In fact, I know where you can get a copy.
ADDENDUM the First
I don't think it's just me. Michael just read Touch the Dark, and was bugging me to finish reading Claimed by Shadow so he could read the sequel when he was done. However, he didn't even finish the first chapter of Claimed by Shadow before putting it down and moving on to something else. His reason was that Cassie was annoying him.
Rating: 5/10
On the Prowl (2007)
Patricia Briggs, Eileen Wilks, Karen Chance, Sunny
Wow. Talk about a mixed bag. I read and thoroughly enjoyed the first two stories. I started the last two and thought, “meh.” But then realized that to review the book I had to finish all four stories.
I should have trusted my first instincts and just reviewed the first two stories leaving the last two unread.
The anthology opens with Patricia Brigg’s story Alpha and Omega. This is the prequel to her book Cry Wolf, which I read earlier (not realizing this story was in fact a prequel to it). If you’ve read her Mercy Thompson series, then you’re already familiar with Charles. But if you haven’t read the Mercy series (which really, you should) it won’t matter, because the main character is Anna, a young werewolf who has been terribly abused by her pack. A call to the Marrok brings Charles to town, to look into the problems with her Chicago area pack.
This story is the reason I picked up the anthology in the first place. I really like Patricia Brigg’s storytelling and characters. Why did it take me so long to read this anthology? Who can understand why my brain works the way it does, but this story was worth the cost of the anthology.
Anna has been physically beaten down, yet despite everything, her spirit has not yet be broken. But not for a lack for trying.
What I found particularly fascinating was what we discovered to be the eventual reason for the situation in Chicago. Some things cannot be forgiven, but sometimes they can be understood. She did a very good job of that with this story.
Although this story is a prequel to Cry Wolf, everything is resolved, and you do not need any prior knowledge of any other characters to enjoy the tale. Very good and very enjoyable.
The second story was Inhuman, Eileen Wilks. Kai isn’t human, and knows her neighbor isn’t truly human either, but both have secrets about their identity that could cause them plenty of trouble, because although magic known to exist, full humans are not particularly accepting of those with magical powers, and being stranger than the already strange can get both of them in a lot of trouble.
This was also a very well done story. We are introduced to the characters and to the world they inhabit, which is not precisely our world. So excellent world building and character building, all in a short story. I also liked the twists at the end. I’d consider reading another story about these characters, although I’m not sure that there’s necessarily one there, she did such a good job with this story.
There is romance and boinking, but it follows the natural course of the story, so I didn’t mind.
The last two stories in the anthology, on the other hand, I am sorry I bothered to read. Karen Chance’s story Buying Trouble can all but be summed up in yesterday’s twitter: “Magical boinking and a plot where I felt I was missing 3/4 of the story.” Yeah, that’s right. Magical boinking. The plot ranged all over, was hard to get a grip on, and never quite made sense. Why did these people/creatures live this way? How do they move back and forth between earth and the magical realm? Why would Claire remain in touch with the magical world, since no good ever came from her nature? Why didn’t Clarie just go somewhere she wouldn’t be recognized for what she was? And WHY FOR THE LOVE OF GOD THE MAGICAL BOINKING?! I could have lived without a story where one of the partners transforms into a reptile during sex. Ugh.
But the last story was Sunny’s story Mona Lisa Betwining. There was not plot as far as I could tell, just random excuses for lots and lots and lots of boinking. Why do they boink? Because they can apparently. Oh, and she has to boink or bad things will happen. Good grief. Give me a break.
This was a story very obviously set in an a preexisting world with preexisting characters. Without that background the story made almost no sense and I could not have cared less about the characters. As far as I could tell, the only point of the story was to fit as much boinking as possible into sixty pages, just for the sake of boinking.
No thanks.
So I recommend On the Prowl with reservations. The first two stories are very good. The fourth was little else but boinking, and the third story was a simply mess. With magical boinking. I’d say get it for the first two stories, and then pretend that the last two stories are part of some other anthology entirely and completely unrelated to the first two stories.
Rating: 6/10
Books by Karen Chance:
Touch the Dark (2006), Claimed by Shadow (2007)
