2008 urban fantasy, fourth in the series. Kitty Norville, the
late-night DJ who has become the world's most famous werewolf, returns
to Denver to be with her sick mother; which means that all the
problems she's been running away from come back to haunt her, with new
ones to join them.
So all right, there's vampire politicking and werewolf dominance
fights and these bleed into each other; and you can see the rails
hauling Kitty towards her destiny as a major player; and Vaughn
apparently believes the discredited stuff about wolf pack alphas, or
at least she doesn't try to analyse it the way Ilona Andrews did.
But the reason I came back to this series is Kitty's development as a
character, and while she shows some of the unwelcome tendency to defer
to everyone that's characterised her earlier appearances, she's
certainly moving forward, both as a person and as a pack leader.
She'd expressed a great deal of worry that, out of the blue, I'd
apparently shacked up with my lawyer. I didn't tell her he'd become
a werewolf in the meantime. "I don't know, Mom. Maybe Christmas?"
There are real-world problems as well as supernatural ones, and some
of them even blend in interesting ways. As the first book was at pains
to point out, abuse is still abuse even if you claim "animal
instincts" made you do it.
I only came back to this series because I was reminded of Vaughn's
excellent SF short story That Game We Played During the War and
thought I'd give these books another try after the disappointment of
the previous two; while this is still fairly slight and
straightforward it packs an effective punch of story and character.
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