Customer Reviews

A worthy continuation of a great series - By: Helen Hancox, 07 Jun 2006
This book is the cause of great tiredness today - I tried to stop reading it at 11pm last night when wanting to go to sleep but it had become so exciting that I couldn't sleep & had to pick it up again, finally finishing it at 1am.

Book 4 of this excellent series is slightly differentin that some time has passed since the end of book 3, rather than it being a non-stop roller-coaster ride of Joanne's life. She's now working as a sidekick on a weather channel, livingin a nondescript flat & not using her weather powers at all to prevent a power lobotomy. David, her seriously weakened lover/Djinn, has to spend almost all of his timein the bottle as he's draining her powers & is on the verge of becoming an Ifrit.

This story focuses rather more on Joanne & how she deals with different situations without using her powers. The usual list of characters are there - Lewis, Jonathan, Paul, Rahel, Alice, David & Ashan, but we also meet her sister, her sister's new boyfriend & a policeman who was a former partner of Quinn's.

There's a kind of subtextin this book about good & evil - yes, Quinn was evil but he also had some good. Another character who appears good turns out to be evil, but he also has some redeeming features. Although overall this series might come across as a battle between good & evil that's not always the case - yes, the wardens are manipulating the weather to prevent loss of life & damage through natural causes, but we learnedin the last book that the Ma'at believe that the wardens have actually increased the problems from the weather due to their interference. We learn more about this at the end of the book as we discover the underlying reason that things are going wrong.

The romance between David & Joanne is still therein this book, as is the little surprise that David left for Joannein the last book, but the story focuses more directly on Joanne. When the book finished I found myself breathless, waiting for what was coming next (I have several more months to wait for it to be published, unfortunately) but also slightly disappointedin the direction Rachel Caine had taken with a couple of the main characters. I shall wait & see how the follow-up pans out & if she brings these new threads into the storyin a satisfactory way. Somehow I think she well, she hasn't let me down so far.

Overall this is a very good book; the dialogue is perhaps a little less sparkling than normal, but there's plenty of action & the characters keep growing, including Djinn who are so difficult to understand, Jonathan being the most impenetrable of them all. I recommend this series highly, although I think it's probably best to read themin order.