 | Title: The Cold Kiss of Death
 Sexual Content: Scenes of graphic sensuality. References to rape. Attempted rape. References to homosexuality.
Good - A fun read with minor flaws. Maybe read an excerpt before buying. |
Description
Genny Taylor works for Spellcrackers.com ±
Making Magic Safe. But her own life is anything but safe!
‘The ghost grasped her shift and ripped it open. The three interlacing crescents carved red-raw and bleeding into her thin chest didn’t look any better than the last dozen times I’d seen them. The wounds weren’t lethal – they weren’t even recent; she’d been dead for at least a hundred and fifty years – but my gut still twisted with anger that someone would do that to a child.’
Being haunted by a ghost is the least of Genny’s problems: she’s also trying to deal with the witch neighbor who wants her evicted. Finn, her sort-of-Ex – and now her new boss – can’t quite decide whether he wants their relationship to be business or pleasure. And then there’s the queue of vamps inviting her to paint the town red; how long before they stop taking no for an answer?
Just when it seems things can’t get any worse a human friend is murdered using sidhe magic. Determined to hunt down the killer and needing help, she turns to one of London’s most capricious wylde fae and the seductive vampire Malik al-Khan.
But all too soon she realizes she doesn’t know who she can trust – and now Genny’s the one being hunted, not just by the police, but by some of London’s most powerful and dangerous supernaturals.
Review
THE COLD KISS OF DEATH by Suzanne McLeod is the second book in the Spellcrackers series featuring Genny Taylor, the only leanan sidhe in London, who works for Spellcrackers, a company that fixes magical problems. The first half of this book was an urban fantasy lovers dream. A version of London overrun with supernatural creatures, a world that has fully integrated both the mundane and magical with deep prejudices on all sides, and a smart protagonist who navigates the line between both. Unfortunately, the second half wasn’t nearly as good.
Given the title of this series, I expected there to be a decent amount a spellcracking work going on. Not so much. In fact apart from one small scene early on, Genny doesn’t work at all in this book. Maybe there was more of that in the first book—I haven’t read it yet—but it felt like an oversight here and I was left feeling kind of disappointing. My biggest problem, however, was the plot. Halfway through it started to get overly convoluted and complicated, with most of the conflicts being increasingly unnecessary. There were usually obvious solutions that would not only have solved Genny’s problems, but avoided them in the first place. Genny was such a smart character that it felt really inconsistent for her to always chose the most ridiculously difficult options.
On the upside, I was pleasantly surprised by how much romance was actually in this book. Genny has three different suitors after her: a satyr, a kelpie, and a vampire. All three of these guys had serious leading man potential and brought out very different sides of Genny. It will be interesting to see who she ends up with because she is frustratingly wishy-washy when it comes to choosing in this book. In my opinion, she only really had feelings for one of the guys since her response to the other two was primarily sexual.
Overall, the first half of this book would have easily earned a 4bat rating, but the second half would have only gotten a 2bat. That averages out to a 3bat rating since this very cool character, in her even cooler magical London, was largely squandered by a plot that grew overly ambitious and messy. THE BITTER SEED OF MAGIC, the third book in the Spellcrackers series, is available now in the UK, and will be released in the US on December 27, 2011
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