Chloe Neill

Neill's new fantasy was an entertaining adventure. Kit Brightling was a foundling raised by an independent woman who had high expectations for her adopted daughters. Kit has become a Captain in the Queen's Own ostensibly working as a courier but actually as an agent of the Queen.

The Queen calls her in to rescue a captured spy from an impregnable prison. The only problem is that the Queen wants her to work with a member of the Beau Monde, a Viscount named Rian Grant. They do not immediately show more hit it off.

Grant feels that he has done his service to the Queen in the battles on the Continent. Now he wants to spend time on his estate since it was run down during the war and needs his attention to get it out of debt. But rescuing the spy only begins the adventure because he gives them information leading to a traitor within the government of the Queen.

This story takes place in 1815 or so in a world similar to that of the Napoleonic era except that in this world there is magic. Kit is aligned to the sea which is an advantage for a sea captain. However, the former emperor Gerard has been exiled to an isolated island but his supporters have plans to free him which involves lots of magic.

I liked the relationship that grew between Kit and Grant and that it wasn't an "instant love" sort of relationship. I liked Kit's relationship with her crew. The whole setting was excellently done. I loved the details about sailing ships. I also loved that in this world there seemed to be a lot of equality between the sexes and a multi-ethnic society. Of course, there were also the old fuddy-duddies of the Beau Monde who didn't want women in positions of power and certainly not foundlings. There was also a prejudice among the Beau Monde regarding magic and its use.

I can't wait for more of Kit Brightling's adventures. show less

I needed a break from golden age mystery, and with bad back pain, I needed something that didn't require a high degree of concentration, and where there was a high probability of violence so I could vent vicariously. Urban Fantasy to the rescue!

I generally love Chloe Neill's writing for its wit and snark almost more than for her ability to tell a good story. Luckily she does tell a good story, because this series has less wit and snark than her Chicagoland series did. It's not barren of show more humor at all, but it lacks the verbal dances Merit and Ethan and Mallory entertained me with.

Still, it's a good story line and Clair is a strong protagonist who does not engage in love triangles or damsel in distress crap. I was able to get lost in a post apocalyptic New Orleans where magic is a thing and the author explores the 'us' vs. 'them' mentality that is so very, very prevalent today.

Good escapist reading with characters you can like and cheer for. I could do without the book ending with a soft cliffhanger, but I girl can't have everything and I'll take soft cliffhangers over love triangles any day! show less

I was a big fan of the Chicagoland Vampires series, but wasn’t quite so sure about the spin-off until I finished the first book (which started slow). Then I was hooked. Wicked Hour was even better than the first book combining a group of established friends from the first book with a great setting, snarky dialog, and an interesting mystery. What is the mysterious beast in the north woods of Minnesota?

The two main characters of this series are a vampire and a werewolf in love with each show more other, so I expected the inevitable conflict between species to be one the author might milk for at least a couple of books. So imagine my glee when she didn’t take that trope-tastic route but instead had her two main characters act like rational adults.

Where the author did skirt the line was the amount of animosity Lis was up against from the werewolf clan. At times it felt too manufactured to be believed, although towards the end the author made it work by turning it inward and making it about something larger than Lis’s vampirism.

All up it was an excellent sophomore entry in a promising new series I look forward to continuing. show less

Merit is attacked one night, and a vampire saves her life by turning her. Now, instead of writing her dissertation, Merit has to deal with a whole new identity and a whole new set of problems.

This book should totally satisfy my id. Merit and I are both grad students living in the same neighborhood, with best friends with colored hair and a penchant for Buffy. She becomes the bestest vampire ever, all the boys want her, and all the girls are either her bestest friend or are jealous and evil. show more Her family is super rich but they don't understaaaaand her. She runs around in a black leather bustier carrying a magical katana, for goodness sake! It really does not get much more obviously focused on wish-fullfillment than this. Perhaps if I were fifteen, I'd have been able to dive straight in. But as it was, I just could not suspend my disbelief. Merit is supposedly super smart and loves English lit, but when she's forced to drop out of UofC (no vamp can attend), she just takes it. She doesn't petition the school, doesn't meet with her advisor, doesn't continue writing her diss...She's introduced to people who lived hundreds of years ago, and is too busy cataloguing their clothes (why do all vampires wear designer labels in all-black?) to wonder if they saw a play at the original Globe, or how they feel about language shifts, or what songs or folk legends they know that have been lost to history. I just plain don't buy her as someone who cares about literature (putting aside her absurdly vague claim that her focus is on "Arthurian legends"). I don't buy her as a character. And I don't buy her surroundings, either. Merit supposedly lives in Chicago, but there's no mention of public transportation, of the terrifying potholes, of the great and cheap Thai food, elotes on every corner...The majority of people who live in Chicago are non-white (and the neighborhood Merit lives in is actually mostly Mexican and Puerto Rican), yet every single character we meet in this book is white. Every single one. I think one of the vamps might be an Asian lady (based on her "uptilted eyes"), but that's it. And naturally, no one is queer.

And the vampires. Oh ye gods, the vampires. They live in what is basically a dorm. They even have a cafeteria. The hottest boy--er, vampire--has a crush on Merit, for no reason except that they have an instant "connection." They all speak modern English, complete with our current slang, even the ones who are over a thousand years old. They are all the most beautifulest things ever (their eye color, hair color, and clothes are described ad nauseum). They revealed themselves to the public a mere 8 months ago, but apparently this didn't shake up human society at all. The existence of supernaturals is accepted without protest or disbelief. No one seems to care. All sorts of supernatural creatures exist, from sorcerers to nymphs, but nobody *does* anything. Sometimes one vamp will pyschic message another, but that's about it. We meet nymphs of the Chicago River at one point, and they spend several pages catfighting over a boyfriend before making up over promises of pedicures. The big vamp betrayal is revealed when the evil vamp monologues for a number of pages about her Evil Plans. It's all so banal.

This book seems to have been churned out as quickly as possible to capitalize on the paranormal romance trend. Unfortunately for Neill, her book isn't good at providing paranormal adventure or romance. show less