RogerBW's Blog

2009 urban fantasy, seventh in the series. Kitty Norville, the late-night DJ who has become the world's most famous werewolf, gets invited onto a reality show: shapeshifters, vampires and psychics put together in a remote house.

Of course it's not that simple, and things turn deadly. Several characters return from previous books, and not all of them make it out alive. Which gives the story some weight, because it genuinely feels like a shame that they can't now be developed further.

It rapidly becomes obvious what's going on, perhaps too much so since it takes Kitty longer to work it out than it took this reader. But to be fair that's not what the book's about; like soap opera and indeed like what I've heard of reality TV, it's about showing people under stress such that their true characters become apparent. These people just happen to be supernatural creatures.

There's also setup for what I assume will be the next phase of the series, as Kitty becomes an unwitting focal point for the next stages of some very long-running plots. What's impressing me about this series is not so much the way Vaughn handles the standard urban fantasy tropes but rather, as in the Kate Daniels series, the way she stays within the broad outline of the tropes but keeps her world interesting and original.