CROUCHING VAMPIRE, HIDDEN FANG

Author: Katie MacAlister ISBN: 9780451226723 5/2009 PARANORMAL Publisher: SIGNET

Pia's dream of being married has come true. But her husband is straight out of her nightmares. Pia Thomason is torn between two Dark Ones and feeling like a fool, considering she doesn't know where either of them is. Alec is no doubt brokenhearted over finding out that Pia was mated to his best friend, Kristoff. And hubby Kristoff believes she has ties to the group trying to destroy his people. So Pia goes back to her humdrum Seattle life, determined to forget about Kristoff—but fate has other plans. With Alec missing, something truly evil threatening her ghostly charges, and the vampire community hunting them for crimes they didn't commit, Pia realizes that if she and Kristoff are going to be shackled together for better or worse, she may as well start to enjoy it.

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

Sometimes when a book, in a series that had previously been stand alone novels with an over-reaching arc throughout them all, becomes part one of two, it can be annoying. After all, the first five books in Katie MacAlister’s Dark Ones series could have been read in just about any order, or you could skip a book or two, or read them in the order they came out. ZEN AND THE ART OF VAMPIRES however, changed that. ZEN told the first part of Pia and Kristoff’s story, which CROUCHING VAMPIRE, HIDDEN FANG then picked up and finished.

Unfortunately, I have not read ZEN yet so I was left bewildered by a lot of the story. From what I could tell, Pia’s Beloved and husband is Kristoff—but she had a romance with Alec, a different Dark One she thought she loved, who was now missing and put suspicion upon Pia/Kristoff that they murdered him. There is also the matter of her being married to Mattias and being part of a brotherhood that tends to kill the Dark Ones.

As part of the Dark One series, in general I think it worked very well. I enjoyed seeing familiar faces (Allegra and Christian are always a hoot in my book) and for the most part I liked Kristoff. Pia tended to go from enjoyable to irritating in less then a page, honestly. From what I could tell, a lot of her problems were her own doing and still problems because she didn’t fix them. She expected them to be fixed for her. I did feel for her though, in regards to the cold shoulder Kristoff was giving her (though I completely understood why Kristoff was being so cool with her).

As part of a two-book specific storyline however, I think the book fell short. A recap of the previous book wouldn’t have been remiss, or even some sort of acknowledgment that you should read ZEN first and then read CROUCHING so that confusion over particulars didn’t occur would have been fine.

Alexandra Cenni