Customer Reviews

Night Life (Nocturne City, Book 1)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

It starts out like an old Anita Blake novel: there's a supernatural serial killer on the lose and it's apparently up to a lonely in-the-closet werewolf named Luna, using only her PI skills and "tough as nails" attitude to bring him in.
But the plot isn't nearly as entertaining as it sounds and it quickly becomes convoluted. And unfortunately, none of the characters make up for it, either. Luna's a total b*tch, (not in a good way), and I found it really hard to believe that she was supposed to be some sort of hotshot homicide detective. Luna basically just bumbles around all day, occasionally bullies people, even tries to make an arrest at one point---with no warrant, gun, or badge, (apparently she'd forgotten she was fired, i guess). I know it's fiction, alternate reality or whatever, and it's not like i wanted to read about Luna doing paper work all day, but a little credibility wouldnt have hurt.
And then there's the grieving "russian" alpha werewolf Dimitri, Luna's love interest; a former pimp turned drug dealer prone to temper tantrums. He spends his days smoking pot while he squats in a filthy abandoned movie theater with the rest of his crew. Also, (spoiler alert!), he's into beastiality. You'd think with all those labels the poor guy would manage to have a personality, right? But he doesn't.
I often found myself contemplaiting the author's picture at the back of the book; is she still in high school or something? It would explain a lot...
I also feel like i should mention that i checked out the sequel, (Pure Blood), from my local library. Thought maybe i'd give it another try, (it's actually the only reason i forced myself to finish this book), but it was just more of the same. So head's up: If you liked this book, you'll love the sequel...

This book was terribly disappointing. The main character is a werewolf and werewolves are definitely supposed to be aggressive. But where does it say that being a werewolf gives you the excuse to be a complete and utter [...]? There is a difference between being a "tough-as-nails" heroine and just being rude/emotionally unstable. Luna was sadly the latter.

My other main problem was the police work. While the fantasy genre naturally requires some suspension of belief, I still expect some continuity. Luna is just all over the place, barging into things like a moron. Some people probably enjoy this ability for a character to get herself into constant trouble. Personally, I think it just makes her an idiot. If Luna was written as a vigilante, I would totally roll with it.

On a final note, the emotional growth of the character seems extremely forced throughout the whole book but particularly on the last few pages. I never got into the romantic subplot, since I never grew to like the main character, and maybe that accounts for my apathy... but somehow I doubt it.

I call it the Anita Blake Effect -- a supposedly tough and powerful heroine who just ends up being dumb, bratty, whiny, selfish and violent.

Unfortunately that effect is in full force in Caitlin Kittredge's debut "Night Life," a cheesy little urban fantasy that manages to be convoluted and simplistic at the same time. The biggest problem is the protagonist Luna, a truly repulsive character in a cast of nasty rotten people -- she's one of those charming supernatural "heroines" you would chew your own leg off to escape, since she's only interested in her own woes, sex, and bitterness.

Luna (cheesy) is both a cop and a werewolf in the bleak Nocturne City (cheeeeesy) is called in to investigate a brutally murdered hooker... who is also a Redback werewolf. Her investigation takes her to the Redback alpha/pimp Dmitri, but she finds that she just doesn't believe that the best suspect is actually the guilty party... yeah, she basically lets him go because he's hot. And when another hooker is found brutally murdered, they have a suspect: Stephen Duncan, a poor little rich boy who was having sex with both women.

But of course, Luna just KNOWS that Stephen isn't the bad guy. In defiance of her superiors -- and Stephen's megarich father -- she and Dmitri start investigating who really murdered the women. Unfortunately they have a new supernatural enemy, a mysterious witch that left a strange mark on Luna. All these factors tie in with a strange, ancient demon named Meggoth... who might be about to make a reappearance. Cue spooky music.

Taken by itself, "Night Life" is a mediocre urban fantasy -- serial killings, cop friction, really bad detective work, a miserable and seedy city with werewolves and witches running around. There's nothing particularly special about it, and Caitlin Kitteridge's little touches make it worse -- unintentional cheesiness with the names (Sunflower? A werewolf named Luna? NOCTURNE CITY?), fantasy Wicca, and some random plot twists that are never explained (what exactly is a "watchman"?).

And that bland little plot manages to be both too simple and too complex -- there's too much going on, and too little of it has to do with the actual plot (such as the oh-so-kinky trip to the "flesh-sculpting diva). At the same time, it's glaringly obvious who the bad guy is from early on -- and the climax rapidly spirals into an unintentionally silly showdown that clangs to a stop like a dungeon door. (Really, an ancient and dangerous demon who turns out to Just Wanna Be Wuvved? Cue laugh track).

But the worst part of the book is Luna, whose dark and angsty personality is expressed by a black bedroom and (if the cover chick is an indicator) Hot Topic gothwear. She's also a Mary Sue of the highest caliber -- an unjustly-loathed outcast who is still dominant enough to make werewolves quake, uber-sexy, the best cop ever, and so strong and tough and unique that everyone (including Moggath) is impressed by her.

And the Anita Blake Effect means that she never misses a chance to unleash bitter vitriol or fly into a rage, violent, self-absorbed (apparently being forced into bottom-rung prostitution isn't as bad as having a MEAN OL' GRANNY) and so breathtakingly dense that she bumbles through the case on luck. It doesn't help that the cover chick is a dead ringer for Kittredge.

And the rest of the cast is similarly repulsive, mainly so Luna will seem like a Tuff Strong Woman. All the women are jealous, evil or dead, and all the cops are brain-dead misogynist pigs who constantly say things like "if you did you'd be home with your man wearin' nothing but a cute little apron" without getting in trouble. Oh yes, and Luna is the only female cop in an ENTIRE CITY. Yeah, that's likely.

"Night Life" is a devastatingly stupid, offensively snotty little urban fantasy whose tepid plot can't even begin to cover up the wretched Mary Sue heroine. Give this one a miss... in fact, don't even touch it.

If a good book is like taking a journey with the author, letting his or her main character lead you breathlessly along a winding road with sharp turns, sudden stops, dark tunnels, and a final, exhilarating downward rush from the climax to the conclusion, then avoid the whiplash this craptastic book will give you. This book is the equivalent to riding shotgun in a Fairlane P.O.S that fairly CRAWLS along a road riddled with potholes and crumbling pavement. It bounces you painfully from one page to the next with wooden, uninspired dialogue, stilted descriptions, and mind-numbing characters you can't work up the energy to dislike, let alone cheer for. Oh, and this is all surrounded by mundane, utterly BORING scenery that's loosely explained by something called the Hex Wars. So when I say it's bad, I do mean it's bad.

Books are meant to be enjoyed, not endured, but this one requires you do just that to get to the end. I couldn't manage it. I could only make it about halfway before I put it down in disgust and disappointment. So now it's sitting on my coffee table, abandoned and soon to be sold to a used book store, as a testament that some roads (and journeys) are better off not taken. They're just not worth the whiplash.

This book was bad. The more I think about it the more I believe it has no redeeming qualities.

The detective work in this book is shoddy and unbelievable. At one point she is under suspension without pay. So of course she goes to arrest a guy without an arrest warrant, without telling anyone, and without a gun. She has flimsy evidence to begin with, and after the guy knocks her out and beats her up, she just goes home instead of reporting any of it.

This type of stuff constantly happens. She tries to accuse almost everyone she meets of being the serial killer on the smallest evidence, and never with back up.

Or how about when she goes to the Archives and the employees there say they are burning evidence and she just steals a folder from the burn pile and never even considers telling her boss (and friend) that a bunch of evidence is going up in smoke.

The writing in general was poor, with descriptions often leaving me scratching my head and wondering what just happened.

For example:
"Sandovsky's body tensed and I saw the spring, the tackle, me going down under his weight, him wrestling my gun from me and taking aim. [...] I slowly lowered my weapon." (pg 100) - What just happened there? Was the tackle in her mind? I'm guessing so, but the context clues are very vague and it throws me out of the story when I have to stop and analyze what the writer is trying to do. This happens a lot.

I might have given this book 2 stars for effort, but I believe I was mislead by the reviewers here. The second book in this series got 5 stars, this one 3 ½ stars. I figured this book had some growing pains but could be worth reading if the series turned out to be quality.

Except this book is barely readable. And when looking at who actually wrote the 5 star reviews, well, some of them are by authors that Caitlin Kittredge has also given 5 stars too. That makes me a bit hesitant to believe their reviews.

I REALLY wanted to love this book. It is a new entry in a genre I love and never get tired of so I had high hopes for it...which were quickly dashed. The world building is fine and the premise - former troubled wild-teenager-now-adult must come to grips with her were nature and place in the world - was nicely done and I was willing to overlook a few minor plot holes. The characters, however, were not engaging or believable and that I can't overlook. I found Luna totally unsympathetic and incompetent (judging from the stupid things she did repeatedly it was impossible to believe she'd been a cop for 7 years and had worked her way up to detective), Dimitri an unlikely love interest (when all is said and done, the guy was a pimp and drug dealer who saw nothing wrong with that, including "managing" his now deceased prostitute mate) and the two really interesting characters, Sunny and the grandmother, were simply there to take abuse and prove how badly treated Luna had been, respectively.

I am a book addict with a 5 book a week habit (and therefore willing to overlook much to feed it) but I won't be buying the follow up to this book, I'm afraid. Darn. I REALLY wanted to love this one.

Night Life the first book in the new Nocturne City urban fantasy series had some interesting things going on. There was plenty of action and a pretty well done paranormal serial killer mystery, but I really didn't warm up to the homicide detective werewolf heroine Luna Wilder.

I realize that we didn't see Luna at her best, it was verging on a full moon and she was having some impulse control problems, but it seemed like this was just a heightening of her regular personality -- she continually rushed into situations where she was outmatched but somehow still managed to survive due to sheer dumb luck. Even though Luna was very successful in the detecting part of her job. It bothered me that though somehow Luna had made detective after working as a beat cop for five years, she didn't seem to have the ability to work within the system. Here Luna commited career suicide by indulging in bouts of insubordination and in violence against a less than savory co-worker which served to lower her to his sluglike level. Adding to her lack of unprofessionalism, she not only got personally involved with another were Dmitri, a former pimp and pusher, who started out initially as a suspect in the murder she was investigating but she also shared case information with him, details that would she would be required to keep secret in order make a clean arrest and be able to take her case to court.

Even though the book would have worked much better if Luna had been a private detective or a bounty hunter which I admit would have been less original -- the book had some things going for it. The Insoli, lonely wolf thing for the packless Luna, along with her loathing of her werewolfness, worked to win her some sympathy, and Dmitri's actual portrayal, despite his less than savory setup, was more honorable than you'd think. I am not sure if Luna's acceptance of her wolf side at the end of the story will help Luna's character in future books, but despite its flaws the story was interesting enough and Luna good enough at solving mysteries that I may give the next one a try.

Eh, this was not the novel I was hoping it to be. Luna Wilder and all her antics seemed very much thrown about and rushed into. Understandably with Luna being a werewolf we should expect some unpredictability and agression but that seemed to be par for this character no matter what time of the month it happens to be. As a cop she rushes unthinkingly into dangerous situations without heed to herself or others (like her sister, her boss, or her friend Dmitri).

Luna is repeatedly fired - at first for just being a smartmouth but then for getting too close to the truth (although I'm still not quite sure how that happened). As she blunders her way through the investigation she repeatedly accuses (and arrests) her suspects even though she has minimal basis for the arrest.

It seems only due to luck and the friends and acquaintances she has managed not to scare off that she is able to save the day. Both Luna and her alpha werewolf 'friend,' Dmitri, are unlikeable as heroes.

Oh and the plot... Ukrainian illegal immigrant women (mostly prostitutes) are being killed in a ritual of death to release a demon and the DA, his assistant and his son are all in on it. Frankly I feel worst for the women who had to rely on Luna to keep them safe...

This book starts out with the typical urban/para stuff, in a pretty cool world with some fun characters, but it really falls apart at the end. It seems entirely too rushed towards the end, with some plot holes and just complete confusion about what the heck is going on and happened. Nothing really gets resolved, her cousin gets dismissed, she has some 1 page kinky sex with another character who dies and comes back to life with little explanation, and that's pretty much it. The whole climax demon summoning sequence just seems phoned in.

I read this genre a lot. It's my favorite, so I'm always willing to give a book like this a chance. Sometimes you find gold and sometimes it's dreck. This is definitely of the dreck variety. The plot in the first half of the book hangs together OK, then goes COMPLETELY out the window in the second half. The dialogue is hideous. Frequently, your left going "Huh"? It's as if whole sentences are missing that might have made sense of what was said. The lead character, supposedly a hardened streetwise police detective, walks face first into a trap that Pauline wouldn't have fallen for. At the end of the book, somehow, instead of landing in jail as she should have - all her problems magically went away.

It doesn't take much to make me happy in this kind of book. Write characters that are likeable, dialogue that works and a plot that makes sense and I feel like I got my money's worth. This book didn't have any of that. I should be asking for my money back. I obviously didn't see this book the way others did...but then, I didn't get paid to write my review.