Raven Cursed (Jane Yellowrock #4) by Faith Hunter
My rating: 7 out of 10 stars
Jane Yellowrock is a shape-shifting skinwalker and vampire hunter for hire. But lately instead of just slaying vampires, she’s been working for them.
The vampires of Asheville, North Carolina, want to establish their own clan, but since they owe loyalty to Leo Pellissier, the Master of the City of New Orleans–and Jane’s boss–they must work out the terms with him. To come up with an equitable solution, Leo sends an envoy with the best bodyguard money can buy: Jane Yellowrock.
But when a group of local campers is attacked by something supernatural, Jane goes from escort to investigator. It’s up to her to keep peace in the region, and unless she wants to face up to very angry vampire Master, Jane will have to work overtime to find the killer. It’s a good thing she’s worth every penny.
Finally Jane Yellowrock grows a bit of (bad ass) character and gets a wee bit of charisma. When I read the first book in this book series I thought it was a promising start but then the series kind of fizzled out. It felt like it never went anywhere and, most importantly, the main character, Jane Yellowrock, just felt bland with a severe lack of charisma. This book is an improvement in that area.
In this book I finally felt that Jane developed a bit of a personality and a bit of a bad ass attitude as well instead of trying to stay under the radar of everyone and hide her true nature. Jane has advanced in the ranks of the Mithrans. She is still considered more or less just hired help by Leo Pellissier of course but at least she is more or less in charge of the, I was about to write human but non-mithran or non-vampire might be a better wording, part of the crew. Although far from the charisma of, for example, Harry Dresden, she does show some attitude and do bite back quite a bit more in this book than in the previous ones.
The book starts off with a “simple” mission of providing security for a high level pow waw between the Mithran clans but things pretty quickly goes bad…and then they go really bad. The story is a bit of a roller coaster ride with conspiracies, werewolves, other supernatural creatures and, just to add to the excitement, the author throws in angels and daemons as well. Oh, there is a drunk werecat as well and, quite frankly, I could have been without that one.
Still, the book was fairly entertaining to read. The books in this series have always been well written but lacking in some areas making it difficult for them to keep my attention. This one was definitely an improvement over the last two books and kind of restored my interest in the series. Jane still does wallow and moan a bit about how she causes pain to others as well as about her faith and a few other things. If the author could just dump that rubbish the series would become quite good. I would also like to see some development of Jane’s powers instead of just the very vague hints that are surfacing from time to time.
PG's Ramblings 