Mini Reviews: The Isis Collar + Royal Street

THE ISIS COLLAR

(Blood Singer #4)

Cat Adams
Adult Urban Fantasy
381 pages
Tor
Available Now
Received from publisher for review

THE STORY (from Goodreads)

Celia Graves was once an ordinary human, but those days are long gone. Now she strives to maintain her sanity and her soul while juggling both vampire abilities and the powers of a Siren.

Warned of a magical “bomb” at a local elementary school, Celia forces an evacuation. Oddly, the explosion seems to have no effect, puzzling both Celia and the FBI. Two weeks later, a strangely persistent bruise on Celia’s leg turns out to be the first sign of a magical zombie plague.

Finding the source of the plague isn’t Celia’s only concern. Her alcoholic mother has broken out of prison on the Sirens’ island; her little sister’s ghost has possessed a young girl; and one of Celia’s boyfriends, a powerful mage, has disappeared.

MY THOUGHTS

The Isis Collar packs a punch from the very first page, Celia’s attempt to evacuate a school she believes to be in danger thanks to a tip from a clairvoyant setting the tone for what proves to be a thrilling, non-stop ride. Those readers (like me) who haven’t read the prior books will be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to feel comfortable with Celia and her world, Ms. Adams providing just enough context at the mention of a character or event to help us newcomers to the series find our footing and engage in the story without the weight of a giant question mark holding us back. While we’re certainly missing a bit of the back story with regard to Celia’s vampire and siren abilities as well as her history with the two men in her life, it’s blissfully easy to form a connection with her even in the absence of such knowledge, and we’re given a complete story that barely gives us time to breathe before Celia finds herself in even deeper trouble than she was the page before.

Celia is a brilliant heroine; a woman who gets beat down and bloodied repeatedly on her job and who often doesn’t fair too much better emotionally with an alcoholic mother and two very complicated men who refuse to hide their interest in her, but yet her resolve and determination never falter. She’s a fighter through and through, never complaining or despairing of her lot in life, instead striving to help those who need her regardless of whether or not she’ll receive even so much as a thank you in return. The love triangle is an interesting but subtle one, giving us just a taste of romance to get our hearts fluttering before our adrenaline spikes again and we’re off with Celia battling the paranormal. This is definitely a series I will be continuing, and I greatly look forward to going back and reading the first three to see if my opinions of certain characters remain the same once I know their full history.

Rating: 4/5
 

ROYAL STREET
Sentinels of New Orleans #1
Suzanne Johnson
Adult Urban Fantasy
336 pages
Tor
Available Now
Received from publisher for review

THE STORY (from Goodreads)
As the junior wizard sentinel for New Orleans, Drusilla Jaco’s job involves a lot more potion-mixing and pixie-retrieval than sniffing out supernatural bad guys like rogue vampires and lethal were-creatures. DJ's boss and mentor, Gerald St. Simon, is the wizard tasked with protecting the city from anyone or anything that might slip over from the preternatural beyond.

Then Hurricane Katrina hammers New Orleans’ fragile levees, unleashing more than just dangerous flood waters.

While winds howled and Lake Pontchartrain surged, the borders between the modern city and the Otherworld crumbled. Now, the undead and the restless are roaming the Big Easy, and a serial killer with ties to voodoo is murdering the soldiers sent to help the city recover.

To make it worse, Gerry has gone missing, the wizards’ Elders have assigned a grenade-toting assassin as DJ’s new partner, and undead pirate Jean Lafitte wants to make her walk his plank. The search for Gerry and for the serial killer turns personal when DJ learns the hard way that loyalty requires sacrifice, allies come from the unlikeliest places, and duty mixed with love creates one bitter gumbo.

MY THOUGHTS

Royal Street is an exciting beginning to a new urban fantasy series that features a feisty junior wizard sentinel with a penchant for disobeying almost every order she’s given by the men in her life. While it sounds as though that might be a particularly irritating quality in a heroine, DJ disregards the rules with flair, often finding herself in over her head while humorously acknowledging her predicament in a way that has our lips twitching in amusement. She doesn’t simply disregard directions from her mentor, the Elders or her sexy new partner out of spite or the mistaken idea that’s she’s more capable than they are, instead she’s the type of person who cannot sit idly by while those she loves are in danger, and while we may groan at her actions at times, we also find ourselves grudgingly supporting her.

Into this supernatural mystery a little romance is worked in, first a relationship of the ridiculous variety with an undead pirate whose lusty thoughts at times overwhelm DJ’s empathic senses, and then of the more serious variety with her FBI partner Alex and his ex-Marine cousin Jake. The romance takes a backseat to the search for DJ’s missing mentor, but the antagonistic relationship she shares with Alex and his subsequent rivalry with Jake keeps us laughing as things get more serious for all the characters, and we can’t help but appreciate that little touch of levity and sexual tension as it provides us with a solid connection to our protagonists. Overall, Royal Street is a fun read full of wit, charm, and all things preternatural, and I’m greatly looking forward to the trouble DJ is going to find herself in down the road.

Rating: 3.5/5