Magic Bites is a step outside my standard tastes in speculative fiction, a southern urban fantasy set in the magitech ruins of Atlanta. Kate Daniels is a saber-sling merc who winds up pulled into a investigation when her mentor is assassinated. Her style is pretty straight forward: Start asking questions until someone tries to kill her, and that's the suspect. What she finds is a plot to set the vampires and lycanthropes of the city at war, and then pick up the pieces.

On the upside, any scene where Kate stares down some high level supernatural being is ace, and well worth it for that alone. On the other hand, I don't much care for this version of a magical setting, or how ordinary humans get along in it. Kate has a Mysterious Bloodline that's hinted at repeatedly, but for people without a magic sword and uncanny reflexes, life seems pretty grim. Magical elements are included because this is a genre book, and they have to be there, but they don't really fuse into a cohesive setting.