Magic Bites (Kate Daniels, #1) by Ilona Andrews

 

Summary:

When the magic is up, rogue mages cast their spells and monsters appear, while guns refuse to fire and cars fail to start. But then technology returns, and the magic recedes as unpredictably as it arose, leaving all kinds of paranormal problems in its wake.

Kate Daniels is a down-on-her-luck mercenary who makes her living cleaning up these magical problems. But when Kate's guardian is murdered, her quest for justice draws her into a power struggle between two strong factions within Atlanta's magic circles.

The Masters of the Dead, necromancers who can control vampires, and the Pack, a paramilitary clan of shapechangers, blame each other for a series of bizarre killings—and the death of Kate's guardian may be part of the same mystery. Pressured by both sides to find the killer, Kate realizes she's way out of her league—but she wouldn't have it any other way…

Summary taken from Goodreads.com

Length: 260 pages (Mass Markey Paperback)

Source:  Toronto Public Library

Publication Date: April 1st 2007

Every month my favourite group on Goodreads matches people up for buddy reads. This just so happened to be the that my buddy read partner and I picked.

I was really, really, really hesitant to read this book because I had a previous bad experience with the novel. About a year ago it was chosen in that group to be one of our "Books of the Month" (group reads) and I was so happy to read it then. Unfortunately I couldn't make it past page 10. I just hated it. So you see why I was nervous about reading it for a buddy read. However I was able to finally get past page 10!

I really had hoped that the book would be much better now that I've read more Urban Fantasy novels and am more familiar with the genre. I do admit that the book wasn't a total failure for me but it wasn't a book that provided a very good glimpse at the writing style of the authors.

While I love a strong female lead it felt as though they tried to hard to make Kate seem tough. She came off very one dimensional to me and I found myself getting annoyed with her very frequently. Though her sense of humour was entertaining it just wasn't enough for me to really embrace her character.

I also had a problem with Curran, I love the way he was introduced in the story but I didn't really like him. Now I know there are a bunch of Curran fans out there in cyberspace but I couldn't stand him and I frequently found myself putting the book down when he came into the scenes because I was overcome with the urge to reach through the book and strangle him for being such a macho idiot.

Okay so those are the things that I didn't like about the book so I suppose I should talk about what I did like huh? Alrighty, well I really liked the world building. I was warned by a friend that the book would be slow due to the amount of world building that takes place because it's the first book in the series. I actually really enjoyed the world building aspect of the novel and I thought it was really neat and interesting. I also liked the humour that was in book. The mystery was also good as well. It kept me guessing and I can honestly say that it surprised me. It was also really interesting to see all the different shifters, hopefully in the next book I'll get to learn more about them as well asthe Order.

So all in all the book wasn't a total and complete failure but at the same time it isn't a book that I would really recommend to another person. Despite my dislike for this book however I'm  planning on reading the second one in the next few weeks or so. I want to make sure that I give the series a fair chance to win me over. If the next one doesn't improve I won't be continuing the series further.

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★ ★