C. T. Adams and Cathy Clamp are a two-woman writing team; from the bio, it seems that Adams does the majority of the idea work and Clamp does the majority of the writing work. I’m guessing it isn’t clear-cut, but in general, each is embracing her strength. I do enjoy the idea of being able to split up the jobs like that; sum of the whole being greater than the parts, etc. This specific novel was given away for free as Tor.com’s book of the week last Friday. You might still be able to get it if you sign up today.

Katie (or Kate; Mary Kathleen Reilly) is a bonded courier; she owns an apartment building and likes to do home-improvement projects. On the less happy side of her life, six years ago she was bitten by a scary queen vampire and now has an awful psychic connection to the Thrall. Vampires in these books are a parasite that operates a little like the Borg collective; biting can either be used for drinking the human blood that the parasite lives off of, or for laying eggs. The scary queen vampire is coming to the time in her life where she needs to pick a successor, and she’d love for it to be Kate. Katie manages to stay uninvolved until her ex-fiance’s niece gets kidnapped, and he asks her to help. Can she find the girl, avoid becoming the Thrall queen, resolve things with the ex-fiance, and stay alive?

Overall, this is not a positive, glowing review, so if you do not want to read my review based on that fact, do not click on the ‘read more’. It’s also pretty long, although I tried to edit it down. If you’re reading this off the feed on LJ, I apologize. There are probably spoilers contained herein, since it’s a little difficult to explain why I did not like the book without them.

Kate’s general survival can be associated with the fact that she is Not Prey. She killed the previous vampire queen, six years ago, and that granted her that status. The fact that she’s a 6′1 redhead with the build of a pro softball player (or beach volleyball, which she did) doesn’t hurt. As a narrator, she was okay — I had a few suspension-of-disbelief problems with the fact that she’s a 6′1 redheaded former pro beach volleyball player, frankly. However, some of the information regarding how she’d dealt with her size in high school and overall was good, and helped with the suspension problems.

I really did like the Thrall. I thought they were a novel use of the vampirism-as-parasite idea, and they were pleasantly horrific and well-described. I did also like that Kate was Catholic, and was actually religious; she wasn’t irksome about it, but she did go to confession. Some of the characters were pretty interesting, as secondary characters who really only had a couple adjectives to their name.

Problems I had with the book included: a good deal of “as you know, Bob” dialogue in the beginning, with Katie’s friend Peg, and random asides about unrelated topics; characters who served entirely as exposition (Peg) and not as, you know, characters; too many characters overall, and some introduced for reasons I could not comprehend; an incredible amount of backstory that left me searching for Book 1 or the prologue novella (which I can’t find; it may not exist); a werewolf society that deviates enough from canon that my suspension of disbelief faltered again; a couple of events that just didn’t make logical sense; Kate’s taste in music; and description that went over the top, in that way where it felt more like the authors were proving that they had visited/lived in Denver, rather than to add verisimilitude. I’ll explain a few of these in more detail.

I would forgive the “as you know, Bob” (characters saying to each other things they already know to clue the reader in; also known as ‘maid-and-butler dialogue’) business if perhaps there weren’t other flaws. In terms of sentence structure and grammar, the book was just fine; it’s rare that a book gets published (other than modern lit) where these elements are a problem. So, no, according to that definition, this book is not badly written. The backstory, on the other hand, comprised at least a novel’s worth, and we got it through flashbacks, dreams, and asides. I would have preferred to be told that there was a novella or something that I missed. It became a little overwhelming. (It should be noted that I did find a review saying that a published version of the backstory may be forthcoming.)

Kate likes Don Henley and AC/DC. Note: the book is set in ‘now’, and Kate’s about thirty. I do not know any 30-year-olds right now who like Don Henley, frankly. Another minor detail that threw me out of the story was that Kate had a bad shoulder injury, and in the sex scene, her partner puts her on top, because it will supposedly cause less stress to her arm. Now, um, last time I checked, being on top means you basically have to support yourself with your arms in a kind of push-up. Katie even puts her hands on the bed above his head. How, exactly, was this causing less stress to her arm? A third one was that there is a priest who runs a mission for victims of a drug that exists in Kate’s world. This priest lets someone volunteer — with mentally ill patients — without checking her references, or even her address. Really?

One scene contained a description of a (spaghetti) restaurant with a bed you can sit on; I thought that that was a little too much description. I hate to use Laurell K. Hamilton’s works as something done right, but I can remember a description of a St. Louis local restaurant, Dierdorf & Hart’s, that was about two lines long. They were a local steakhouse; they wrapped up your leftovers in foil formed into animal shapes. That’s all I really needed to know about the restaurant to prove that Anita had been to a real place. Admittedly, Katie and Tom actually ate at this restaurant on screen, but I did not enjoy the description as I felt it was too heavy-handed.

The werewolves were another problem. I believe that every werewolf pack I have ever read — and that includes Tanya Huff’s idiosyncratic werewolves as well as Kelley Armstrong’s, Laurell K. Hamilton’s, Patricia Briggs’s, Annette Curtis Klause’s, and others I can’t remember — has been based on real/natural wolf packs. Real/natural wolf packs are male-dominated and have alpha males who rule. They also fight for dominance all the time. Clamp/Adams’s werewolf pack was matriarchal. That didn’t work for me at all. The fact that the leader of the werewolf pack had, conveniently, gone to high school with Katie also bothered me. It felt too neat, too pat; like an easy way for the leader to know certain things about Kate without having to learn them.

In short, there were too many worldbuilding and logic flaws for me to enjoy this book. I prefer to read books where my suspension of disbelief doesn’t need to be turned up to eleven, and this one required a twelve at least. I did finish it, but mostly because I won’t review a book I don’t finish. The ending was pretty fast-paced and exciting, as well as gross (in a good way), and that’s about all that can compel me to give this book 1/5 stars.