Friday, December 26, 2008

"All Souls' Night: Blood Ties, Book Four" by Jennifer Armintrout


This has been one of those love-hate relationships, and thank goodness the author gave me the reason near the beginning of this book. The "heroine", Carrie Ames, has just had an argument with her lover, Nathan Grant; he's off to rescue his son, Ziggy, and she doesn't want him to go, believing that he's walking into a trap. Having said some brutal things to Carrie, then storming out, Carrie has an epiphany where she realizes that she is selfish, she is jealous. And that's been my biggest problem with the Blood Ties series - I'm just not all that crazy about Carrie.

Luckily, Armintrout has enough other characters on the canvas, sympathetic ones, that it balances out. If the entire book was told from Carrie's point of view, I don't think I could handle it. In fact, I believe that my review of the second book wasn't overly enthusiastic and I was hoping the third book was better. Well, the fourth book is pretty good, and - get this - it is the last book in the series. Yes, an author who chooses to write a closed-end series, rather than let the thing go on and on and on until I've lost interest due to increasingly poor writing (I think we all know who the guilty parties are, too!)

Carrie and Nathan are still on a mission to stop his sire, Jacob Seymour, also known as The Soul Eater, from attaining god-hood. Enlisted in the mission are various friends and allies, including Max, the vampire-werewolf hybrid; Ziggy, the afore-mentioned son and now vampire; and Bill, an enterprising human who runs a "blood service" for a price (not his own, too many customers). They're up against enormous odds, not the least of which is Dahlia, the witch-turned-vampiress who will perform the ritual that allows Jacob to achieve his god-hood. Except this being Armintrout, things don't go smoothly, and new allies will show up to help save the day. It's an interesting way to end things, mostly satisfying but with a bit of a "Hollywood" ending that I thought rang false. But who wants to end on a sour note, right?

The whole series is worth checking out, more action than romance, and the romance is mostly sex. Armintrout is due to have another work out in August 2009, "Lightworld/Darkworld", and there's a preview at the end of the book. Looks to be fantasy-oriented writing, might be interesting. We'll just have to wait and see, won't we?

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