Cassandra Palmer Series

Beyond Books

Jul 20

Written By

Using my awesome judging-the-cover-to-chose-which-books-I-will-read skills, I picked up this series by Karen Chance. I actually picked up book two, drawn to the cover like a moth to a flame and then prayed the store actually had the first book when I discovered it was a series. I was lucky, they did. So I took home my shiny new copy of Touch the Dark and tried the series out.Cassandra Palmer is a clairvoyant who was raised by vampires after her parents were killed when she was but a wee tyke. Blood and gore don't bother her all that much and she's pretty hard to frazzle. However she's been on the run the last few years when she decided she'd had enough of the vampire mob and mob boss who were trying to control her, so Cassie had been hiding out in a sort of supernatural witness protection plan and her only real ally was a ghost that only she could see and talk to. All hell breaks loose when she's discovered not only by the Master Vampire-slash-mob boss, but also by the vampire senate (yes, there really is one). Next thing you know the entire supernatural world seems to want her, why? Well, she's got a pretty exciting destiny ahead of her and she seems to be the only one who doesn't know what it is!I don't think I actually liked this book. I liked Cassie well enough, but I found the story very hard to get into. Sure I was reading it after having read about 5 books in a row of Rachel Caine's Weather Warden series (reviews coming soon!) but it wasn't that. I found this book to be too much description and not enough dialogue or action. I am a fan of dialogue. I don't care about the back histories of this vampire or that vampire and I was getting sick of every vampire seeming to be someone from history (Raph, is Raphael, the painter turned vampire when he turned down a request from Master Mob Vampire Antonio to paint something, there's the brother of Dracula and a very strong hint that the head of the Vampire Senate is Cleopatra, though she never really comes right out and says it.) I just couldn't get into it and it was making it hard for me to like a character when all you knew about them was page after page of description of why and how they got to be vampires. Yawn. Then again that is just ME.The second book in the series, the one that drew my eye, Claimed by Shadow, proved to be a much more entertaining read. (See?? My cover judging ways proved to be right yet again! Booyah!) Stuff was happening. There wasn't just description of back stories and the plot thickened. Cassie is now heir to the Pythia, the world's chief clairvoyant, with that comes a ton of power that she hasn't been trained for as is the norm. Not to mention there is a pretty powerful spell (geis) that has bound her to a Master vampire and she's going to stop at nothing to try and undo that.Book two held my attention much better than the first and I was caught up in Cassies leaps between past and present and found the predicaments she tended to end up in quite amusing most of the time. And trust me, this girl can get into trouble!The series ends with Embrace the Night, where Cassie, along with War Mage John Pritkin, her friendly ghost Billy and Tomas a Master Vampire are off trying to find the mythical Codex Merlini so she might finally break that pesky gies that binds her to another Master Vampire, Mircea. To do this she must travel to the past and on top of everything else also travel in to the realm of Faerie (where things don`t go so well).Oh, that Cassie Palmer! Always in the thick of things when things get rough. And by this last book I was thinking of her more as someone I`d like to have as a friend than as a character in a book. I didn`t grow too fond of many of the other characters and some of the plot twists made me roll my eyes a little bit, but I think the last book nicely closed off the series and it wasn`t all rushed at the end as it tied up loose ends like a lot of other trilogies tend to be.In closing I would like to draw your attention to the cover art. While pretty and while the girl on the cover has a head (an accomplishment in the book world these days) they are all so similar and it seems to be a NEW trend in the book world to draw the woman`s back and profile. They look similar to the Weather Warden series (again, coming SOON! I even have the images uploaded!) that... well I don`t know. It just BUGS me! And I don`t think she looks ANYTHING like Cassie is described in the books. That ticks me off, because if you`re going to have a human on your cover and it`s a human who is supposed to represent your main character... she should at least LOOK like the character!Am I the only one who thinks this? Surely not! I can't be! Why that would just be... odd!So, there you go. If you're looking for some light reading in the Urban Fantasy genre and want a series that won't go on forever, this one by Karen Chance is one you should try out.(And can someone please tell me why Molly the laptop feels the need to switch to a French keyboard in the middle of my writing? It is so frustrating! Argh!)Cassandra Palmer series