The Blood Prince is the third and final novel in the Sovereign series. If you didn't catch my review of The Gilded King, the first book in the series, you can read it here. I was completely enthralled by TGK and gladly volunteered to ride out the series. I love how the covers emerge with the story, changing from the tiniest creep of Red on TGK, into this bold, saturated beauty.

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Prelude to a Hero is a short, quick read. I think it has a lot of potential as a great fantasy series for younger, male readers. There are great characters, an interesting new world to explore, and plenty of humor to go around. The storyline is pretty straightforward: geeky, unassuming guy discovers that the world has been waiting for a hero...and he's it!

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Needing a bit of a horror fix, I picked this one up. Typically, deep water creature features tend to be of the B-movie quality so I wasn't expecting to be overwhelmed by Leviathan: Ghost Rig. Which is a good thing because it was absolutely as suspected! What exactly DID I expect, you ask? (Well, you might not be asking but you are in for a treat because I'm still going to tell ya!)

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You've heard me say it before but I'm going to say it again: I love the private investigator genre, especially when it's combined with the paranormal side of things. Often called urban noir fantasy, it's probably my favorite urban fantasy subgenre. Something about the way it establishes fantasy elements in the backdrop of the city streets and turns ordinary crime into something remarkable appeals to me.

When I saw the cover of To Dream The Blackbane, I knew I had to read it. The cover looks like a typical private investigator fare until you realize that what's hanging out of that trench coat has ears and a tail: Wolfgang Rex, Rhodian Ridgeback hybrid, PI extraordinaire.
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I'm completely enamored of fairy tale retellings, especially when they are done with a sinister twist. After all, original fairy tales tend to be darker and deeper than the Disney-fied versions that they have become. If you don't know the story of The Twelve Dancing Princesses, essentially a King had 12 daughters. Each night, they were locked into their bedroom. Yet, in the morning, their shoes were completely worn out. The King promised the choice of his daughter's hand in marriage to the man who could figure out the mystery. The House of Salt and Sorrows takes this and gives it a wonderfully creepy gothic flourish.

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At first glance, Second Lives may be considered a horror story but it is so much more. Four people from differing walks of life die. Yet, they are somehow miraculously brought back from the brink of death, long after such a thing should have been possible. Are they really though, as each person claiming to be someone else, with no memory of the person whose body they now inhabit? The more you read, the story transmutes into one of kindness, compassion, and understanding.

The story begins in the past, following four people's lives...and deaths: Elisabeth Wyman, died in 1914 attending a woman's suffragette protest, Timothy O'Neal, in a hit and run accident in 1956, Aryeh Rosenberg, murdered in his watch shop in 1922, and Christine Moore, accidentally falling off her high school balcony in 1992. Then we jump to August 24th. These travelers, as they will be later deemed, wake in new bodies: Elisabeth in the body of Sara Cortland, comatose and pregnant but kept alive until her baby reaches term; Timothy in the body of Henry Rollins, a dementia patient whose body is failing him; Aryeh in the body of James Cooper, a paraplegic gay man who decides he can no longer deal with the demands of life and commits suicide; and Helen Harmon, who chose cardiac surgery so that she can get on with her life. While at first, it was challenging to follow so many different characters and timelines, they eventually blend.

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