2012 urban fantasy, tenth in the series. Kitty Norville, the
late-night DJ who has become the world's most famous werewolf, goes to
London to give the keynote speech at the First International
Conference on Paranatural Studies. It will not go smoothly.
This book is more about moving the series onwards than about
telling a single-volume cohesive story, and I'd definitely not
recommend reading it in isolation.
Kitty has realised that what she's best at is not being a furry death
machine but talking, persuading people to examine their actions and
viewpoints and perhaps change them a bit. And she spends a lot of the
book doing that, so if you wanted lots of fights and smooches Jeanine
Frost-style this isn't the urban fantasy for you.
Her husband Ben is back to being an effective character because his
skills as a lawyer are at least somewhat useful here, and Ben's
brother Cormac (still semi-possessed and coming to terms with it) has
a side story which while it's not full of conflict certainly offers
some development.
In this world, any werewolf can beat up any human, and any vampire can
beat up any werewolf – but that's assuming a level playing field,
which most of the people here aren't so stupid as to allow. Even so,
this has led to a tradition of werewolves serving vampires, and the
major change in this book consists of the European werewolves noticing
that their masters really don't have their interests at heart… and
that there are alternative ways of doing things. Perhaps it's a little
White Saviour, but I felt that Kitty was effectively giving the one
last push needed to bring on something that might have happened
eventually anyway.
This is definitely well outside the urban fantasy standards, in a
quite different direction from the Kate Daniels series, but it's
continuing to work for me. Four-ish books to go in the main series.
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