I haven't read any of the Kate Daniels series before, but have just got the first three books from the library, and as Goodreads tells me there's a prequel short story (in an anthology the library so conveniently has) I thought I'd read that first. I liked it. It's very much in the urban fantasy mould, with Kate hired out to act as bodyguard for a night... to a client who has swallowed something very dangerous and very stolen. I don't want to give too much away, but I was intrigued by the focus on Russian mythology, which I haven't come across often in my reading. I was also really interested in the setting in general, which is a shifting mix of science and magic - on a regular if unpredictable basis, science fails and magic takes over, and vice versa. This naturally requires shifting between two ways of doing things, or finding methods (such as swords) that will work in both. That's a fun, novel approach to take, and I'm looking forward to reading the novels to see where this series goes.