2010 urban fantasy, eighth in the series. Kitty Norville, the
late-night DJ who has become the world's most famous werewolf, is
still post-traumatic from the events of the last book, but has to face
two new problems.
This makes for something of a change of pace: the last few books
have dealt with Kitty as a target for external forces, but one of the
problems here is simply that she's trying to help some fellow
werewolves – Special Forces troops turned by their colleague in
Afghanistan, which worked really well until he got killed without
having taught them how to live as lycanthropes without his
micromanagement – and the other is an attack on the city in which
she's less a target and more an acceptable loss. This does mean we end
up bouncing back and forth between the plots even though everything's
from Kitty's viewpoint, but perhaps because of that this doesn't
suffer from the usual problem of one story being much more interesting
than the other, and Kitty is rather more active about responding to
the problems than she has been in other books.
I did think that many opportunities were missed in the conversations
with the soldiers – from parallels in the stresses she and they have
undergone, to the idea that someone given a rifle and not told how to
use it would probably hurt themselves so why shouldn't lycanthropy be
any different? But I'm the sort of reader who thinks about these
things.
Things do get a bit easy at times but one must assume that Kitty gains
quite a bit of latitude of action from her public persona; and while
she may not be much of a werewolf expert, she's the only one anyone
has access to.
Not the best of the series but still decent.
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