Karen Chance, Embrace the Night

Embrace the Night

Karen Chance

Roc, Apr 2008, $7.99

ISBN: 9780451461995

The Silver Circle is stunned that untrained magic practitioner and vampire crime chief pro Cassandra Palmer has been named Pythia, the chief seer as they expected one of their own to be honored as such. This has always happened for the past few millenniums. Cassandra knows she must become the one due to the domino chaos effect in which a chain of disasters pretty much left her the last one standing.

However to perform her new duties responsibly she has to rid herself of a minor problem. Cassie and sizzling hunk Mircea the master vampire are magically bound to one another; both find this arrangement abhorrent as it crimps their lifestyles. Research leads Cassie to conclude that the only way to survive breaking the link is through an incantation found in the long lost spell-book Codex Merlini. She decides to search the past for this ancient tome not understanding when she starts on her quest why the Codex Merlini vanished; but she will learn soon the hard way that possession places the world in danger from the evil she might inadvertently release as an unintended consequence.

The third entertaining Cassie Palmer dark fantasy (see TOUCH THE DARK and CLAIMED BY SHADOW) focuses on Newton's Third Law of Physics that 'for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction'. Fans will appreciate Cassie's escapades as she tries to end her magical tie to Mircea (though she would not mind a hickey or three from him) leading to potential pandemic peril. Sub-genre fans who have not read Cassie's sags should take a chance as these are well written horror-fantasy tales.

Harriet Klausner