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The first of a new series, and once again Finlayson offers a book that\u2019s everything I don\u2019t normally read (urban fantasy? Me? Um\u2026), and has me utterly absorbed, hanging on every word. Right from the start, as heroine Lexi breaks into a house with the aid of nine cats, I loved everything about it.<\/p>\n
The world Finlayson lays out is (to me) a little different. There are shifters – were-wolves and a whole array of other were-species. There are vampires. There are shapers \u2014 people with a power over one or more elements. And the result is a very different-looking political spectrum. There\u2019s no pretence here that the \u2018other\u2019 species are somehow hidden from the human population, nor that they peacefully coexist. No, the shapers are immensely powerful, and as a result, they call all the shots. There are shaper-controlled areas, where shifters and other non-humans live in cautious subjection. There are separate human-controlled areas. The differences are underscored by place-names \u2014 Britain is Britannia here, and Australia assumes its 17th century name of New Holland.<\/p>\n
So where does our heroine, Lexi, fit in? She\u2019s neither shifter nor shaper \u2014 her peculiar talent is to connect to the minds of animals. I\u2019ve used this ability to a limited extent in my own books, but Finlayson uses animals in some wonderfully creative ways \u2014 even cockroaches! I\u2019d never thought of the little blighters as anything but an irritating nuisance, but here Lexi manages to make them delightfully useful.<\/p>\n
Plot: OK, there\u2019s a plot. Lexi is hiding out in the small seaside town of Berkley\u2019s Bay after a powerful shaper asked her to use her unusual talents to steal a ring from an even more powerful shaper. Not a game she can win, whatever she does, so she\u2019s lying low, running a second-hand bookstore for the vampire who runs the pub, living above the shop with her cat. But then another shaper turns up, and life starts getting difficult\u2026<\/p>\n
The author\u2019s always brilliant at drawing her characters, so it goes without saying that Lexi and all the other shifters and shapers in her world feel beautifully real. However, I have to make special mention of Lexi\u2019s cat, Syl, who is quite awesome from start to finish, and utterly catlike in every way. I adored her. There\u2019s also a blossoming romance for Lexi, and I\u2019m looking forward to seeing how that plays out in the rest of the series.<\/p>\n
Another terrific book from the author. Great world-building, loads of action that kept me turning the pages when I really should have been doing other things, a wonderful main character, a hot but difficult-to-trust love interest, an awesome cat and a mysterious ring. What\u2019s not to like? Five stars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The first of a new series, and once again Finlayson offers a book that\u2019s everything I don\u2019t normally read (urban fantasy? Me? Um\u2026), and has me utterly absorbed, hanging on every word. Right from the start, as heroine Lexi breaks into a house with the aid of nine cats, I loved everything about it. The world Finlayson lays out is (to me) a little different. There are shifters – were-wolves and a whole array of other were-species. There are vampires. There are shapers \u2014 people with a power over one or more elements. And the result is a very different-looking political spectrum. There\u2019s no pretence here that the \u2018other\u2019 species are somehow hidden from the human population, nor that they peacefully coexist. No, the shapers are immensely powerful, and as a result, they call all the shots. There are shaper-controlled areas, where shifters and other non-humans live in cautious subjection. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[63],"tags":[125],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2682"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2682"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2684,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2682\/revisions\/2684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}