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211 of 214 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Awesome new character!, July 16, 2009
This review is from: Skinwalker (Jane Yellowrock, Book 1) (Mass Market Paperback)
If Mercy Thompson and Kate Daniels are some of your favorite heroines, then you don't want to miss out on Faith Hunter's new character, Jane Yellowrock. Jane is a vampire-hunter and skinwalker. But she's much more interesting than Anita Blake, and she's a different kind of walker than Mercy Thompson.
Jane hunts and kills rogue vampires for a living. The only thing she knows about vampires are wrapped up in the ones that go crazy and need to be put down. She's also a skinwalker. Missing pieces of her memories as a young child, all she knows is that she shares her body with Beast, the mountain lion she shifts to when on the hunt. As a skinwalker she can take on other animal forms, but she has a very close tie with Beast. They both have their own memories, thoughts, and will - which makes her a very interesting character indeed.
Jane is called to New Orleans by Katie, an old vampire, who hires her to track and kill the rogue vampire preying on not only the humans in the city but other vampires as well. Turns out this rogue vampire is a lot more older, more powerful, and much more harder to track than Jane thought. While on the hunt, she's also introduced to the vampire world: their lifestyle, politics, and the who's who of vamp society.
Trying not to give all the great stuff away in the review, I will tell you this: there are some really great storylines here. One, the vampire rogue is more than he appears to be. Two, the missing pieces of memory from Jane's childhood return, which answers all her questions about her heritage, her clan, and just how she and Beast became one. And three, all the characters in the novel have great potential.
As an introductory novel, Faith Hunter laid down some solid foundation. Jane is a great character and Hunter makes her interesting enough for readers to want to know more about her past and where she's heading. The details into the vampire world are easy enough to understand, I didn't feel boggled down with some complex history or feel the need to have to memorize names or dates for later novels. All the secondary characters were just as intersting as Jane and Beast themselves, that I just have to know what happens to them and hope to see them in the next Jane Yellowrock story. Skinwalker is written smoothly and rich in detail and story. Kim Harrison calls Hunter, " A new, strongly unique voice in the dark fantasy genre", and that alone is enough in my book!
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119 of 122 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Finally! A Non-Sex-Soaked Urban Fantasy, August 31, 2009
This review is from: Skinwalker (Jane Yellowrock, Book 1) (Mass Market Paperback)
For those of us who read the "kickass female hunter of supernatural whatever" genre, you know that more and more authors have been jumping on this bandwagon, authors who seem to think that as long as you include pages and pages of expository sex between the heroine and the creatures-du-jour then they've created an "urban fantasy".
Thankfully, this author has concentrated on actually providing us with both a complex heroine and complex secondary characters - none of whom immediately fall into each others beds or bodies. Not to mention creating an intriguing storyline, set in one of the genre's favorite places, New Orleans. She's created an interesting universe involving a vampire society that coexists with the human world, and a heroine who is not what she seems on the surface, and whose personal history is still partially a mystery to her as well as us. People get hurt and people die in this story. Not everyone is what they seem, or fits the heroine's mental stereotypes.
This was one of those books that when I picked it up, I couldn't put it down until I finished it. I bought into the world that the author created and I began to care about the characters. I liked Jane Yellowrock because although she's self-assured on the surface, she retains a vulnerability because her past history is veiled to her, and she doesn't know how old she is or where she lived or what happened to her biological family. She also has the added burden of knowing that the action that allowed her to live beyond her normal life span was the result of inadvertent black magic - something that horrifies her conscience. I appreciated the fact that while the male characters in the story were attractive to, and attracted to Jane, that's as far as it went in this book. The author apparently understands that anticipation and mental fantasies are more intriguing to a reader than immediate wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am consummation of sexual attraction.
I am really looking forward to the next book in this series.
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51 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The start of a great new series., July 8, 2009
This review is from: Skinwalker (Jane Yellowrock, Book 1) (Mass Market Paperback)
I was a fan of The Rogue Mage Series before I heard that Skinwalker was coming out. Those were great books. So I was hoping that Skinwalker would be just as good. It was awesome!! Jane Yellowrock and Beast make a great duo of vampire hunting, ancient evil slaying chics. Their personalities are quite different and sometimes at odds with each other, all the while occupying the same space. It was great to watch the two interact with each other as they found themselves hunting down an evil creature who was terrorizing New Orleans.
Hired by the local New Orleans vamp council, Jane roars into the city on her Harley and sets up shop. After a few cat and mouse games with the locals, she picks up on the scent of the killer, and finds herself in more than one life and death situation.
Excellent character backgrounds and development by the author as she builds a great foundation for this series. I am left wondering what's next for Jane. I can't wait to find out.
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