Wednesday 24 March 2010

CBR2 Book 38: "Kitty and the Midnight Hour" by Carrie Vaughn

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Page count: 288 pages
Rating: 2.5 stars
Date begun: March 21st, 2010
Date finished: March 23rd, 2010

Kitty Norville works as a DJ during the night shift, and is getting bored taking the same old song requests. She is also a werewolf, and fully aware that there are vampires and other creatures that go bump in the night, so one night she engages one of her callers on supernatural matters. Very quickly, she has a popular call-in show called "The Midnight Hour", where she offers all sorts of advice to human and supernatural callers alike, and is being syndicated on a number of radio stations.

Not everyone is happy that Kitty is becoming popular and successful, however. The alpha of her werewolf pack is worried about the attention she is attracting, and one evening there is a werewolf hunter sent to kill her, live on the air. Her secret identity is rather spectacularly revealed, and she suspects the local vampire leader may have ordered the hit. She makes a deal with the hunter, and saves her life.

Once the police are forced to accept the existence of supernatural creatures, they call in Kitty to consult on a series of extremely grisly killings. It's obvious to Kitty's advanced sense of smell that the serial killer is a werewolf, and he is not one from the pack. This opens questions about whether the alpha's control is slipping, since he is unaware that a were has been killing young women. As well as helping the police try to catch a serial killer, Kitty has to deal with her pack not being happy about her getting more and more independent and figure out who paid a guy to kill her.

Amazon kept recommending the Kitty Norville books to me, based on the fact that I read a whole lot of other paranormal fantasy series narrated by a first person supernatural protagonist. A quick count reveals that not counting the Kitty Norville books, I'm reading 12 other series, and that's not counting some of the Young Adult books. So it's not surprising that Amazon thinks I might like it. Possibly because I read quite so many different series, and really do love some of them, this just fell a bit flat to me. Kitty was an ok character, and she's clearly still developing, still trying to get used to being a werewolf, establishing her identity in the pack and outside it - but I just didn't care that much about her, or the stuff that happened to her. Having browsed through the blurbs for the rest of the series on Amazon, nothing there interests me enough to make me want to continue the series. It wasn't bad, it just didn't make me want to add a 13th series to my reading list.

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