Soul Breaker (City of Crows #1) by Clara Coulson

 ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆

A solid new start for a series. This urban fantasy novel follows a detective who joins the Department of Supernatural Investigations after witnessing a terrible murder committed by a vampire. The DSI, aka the Crows (as called by the supernatural community) are a human-only force that investigates and runs interference when supernatural crimes occur in the world.

Cal Kinsey is a young hero. He is apparently pretty smart, having attended Stanford in the past. I'm not clear on why he originally joined the police force...but that's not that important. The other characters in the novel from the sexy and alluring witch to the fellow DSI are all pretty well developed and the interplay between the characters is fun. 

The pace of the novel is fast and I thought that the dialogue was pretty decent. I dinged the author a star for some repeated phrases that she leaned on too often, and some of the larger plot points with regard to the romance and the kidnapping of a fellow DSI member were telegraphed very early and made them feel a little too contrived. 

Overall, I enjoyed this novel and plan to read the next in the series. Coulson did a solid job setting up the story and it was a fun, fairly mindless urban fantasy. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Emerald Blaze (Hidden Legacy, #5) by Ilona Andrews

I received this book as an advanced readers copy from Netgalley. ★★★★★ Ilona Andrews is an author whose novels I voraciously read. This one was no different. I couldn't put this book down and finished it in one sitting. It was action-packed and the chemistry between the protagonist and her love interest was stellar. Reader be aware, this does have a love scene. Many of the author's previous novels, while they feature romantic stories, don't have explicit scenes. This novel is set in a parallel universe where due to an epidemic flu and the subsequent solution, magic has been introduced into the world. I would recommend that any reader who hasn't read the first novels in this series starts with the other series first to give them a good grounding and so they won't be confused. The universe that the authors' have created is detailed and there are a lot of moving parts. Even though I had read the previous novels, it had been a while so I couldn't remember som...
Read more

The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey

  ★★★★ ☆ This was a thought-provoking and very interesting novel. The story follows the trials of a woman whose ex-husband has illegally and without her knowledge created a clone of her.  While the story is set in a science-fiction parallel world, I found that most aspects of the novel don't deal with the science-fiction. Instead, it is a story of betrayal, heartbreak, growth, and the human spirit. Despite not liking the protagonist, I still ripped through this novel. It was an interesting introspection on the relationships that create us, and the many facets through which we build our visions of ourselves.  The author subtly weaves a narrative that allows the reader to consider how our upbringings shape us and whether we are defined by our natures or nurture. The end of the novel left me filled with foreboding as I felt the main character began to display traits that she had previously despised in her father. I found myself returning to the storyline and the characters m...
Read more

"Every Which Way but Dead" by Kim Harrison, (The Hollows Book 3)

Image
Description: Some days, you just can't win. Witch and former bounty hunter Rachel Morgan's managed to escape her corrupt company, survive living with a vampire, start her own runner service, and face down a vampire master. But her vampire roommate Ivy is off the wagon, her human boyfriend Nick is out of town indefinitely and doesn't sound like he's coming back while the far-too-seductive vampire Kisten is looking way too tempting, and there's a turf war erupting in Cincinnati's underworld. And there's a greater evil still. To put the vampire master behind bars and save her family, Rachel made a desperate bargain and now there's hell to pay--literally. For if Rachel cannot stop him, the archdemon Algaliarept will pull her into the sorcerous ever-after to forfeit her soul as his slave. Forever. My Review: Harrison's third Hollow's Series novel is much better than the second. The book starts off with a bang as the action pits Rachel's brain aga...
Read more