Melissa F. Olson

“Boundary Lines” continues straight on from where “Boundary Crossed” left off.

Lex, a Boundary Witch who has just come in to her death-magic powers, is working for Mavin, the local Vampire leader, in order to protect her baby niece, who is a null, from the Old World powers who would exploit her.

You got all that, right?

No?

Then read the first book before you read this one.

In “Boundary Lines”, Lex’s world is made more complicated when something goes wrong with the magic in Denver, show more making witches twitchy, pushing vampires into public feeding frenzies, compelling werewolves to invade and unleashing something big, bad and decidedly icky on the world.

There’s a good plot here and, unlike Scarlett Bernard the female lead in the earlier books, Lex is right in the middle of the action: using fists, guns, swords, knives and even fragmentation grenades to kick ass.

The only thing Lex seems not to use is magic, at least not for combat. Lex’s magic is only used to let her interview the not so evil dead. This surprised me a little and left me a bit puzzled. Why have a supernatural heroine who solves all her problems as if she was ex-special services?

“Boundary Lines” was a fun read, with some strong scenes but overall it felt more like an episode in a TV series than a novel that stood up on its own.

I enjoyed learning more about Lex’s past and meeting a Thaumaturge or wonder worker focused on healing. I also liked the scene with the Peller sisters in the cake shop but those parts stood out because they were about the only places with real emotional content.

The rest of the book was action packed and full of twists in the plot but when the resolution was reached, I didn’t really care because I hadn’t become engaged with the characters enough to be worried about what would happen to them.

This is still an above average Urban Fantasy series but I think it has the potential to be outstanding if the characters are given a bit more depth. show less

"Boundary Crossed" starts well and keeps getting better. It opens with:

"The third time I died was early on a Monday morning, a week after Labor Day"

The person speaking is Ex-Army Sergeant Alexandre "Lex" Luther. Working the late shift at a convenience store in Boulder Colorado, she finds a couple arguing about nappies in the baby aisle and realizes that the baby the nappies are for does not belong to them. The ensuing fight and its dramatic conclusion pack a punch that sets the pace for the show more rest of the novel.

"Boundary Crossed" is set in the Old World universe as the Scarlett Bernard trilogy "Dead Spots", "Trail of Dead" and "Hunter's Trail", occupied by vampires, werewolves, witches and nulls. There are cross-over events and characters between the Bernard trilogy and "Boundary Crossed" but, as Lex starts with no knowledge of the Old World, you don't have to read the Scarlett Bernard books first.

With "Boundary Crossed", Melissa Olsen has hit the turbo button on her Old World series. Lex is a much more action-oriented main character than Scarlett is. She starts by attacking two vampires with nothing more than her bare hands and a heavy jar of baby-food and moves on to using automatic weapons and kick-ass magic.

I read the whole book in a day during two (very long) car rides across Germany and the time just flew by. Part of the impact of the book comes from being read by Kate Rudd, one of my favorite narrators. She packs energy into her performance, getting the accents right, keeping the pace up and bringing Lex alive. The rest comes from the character of Lex herself. Melissa Olsen has created a plausible action-oriented main character who also has enough vulnerabilities and enough connections to real life to make her sympathetic and convincing.

The cast of characters around Lex gives a different take on the Old World than the previous books. Boulder is a Vampire town. It has witches but werewolves have been "purged" from the State. Both the lead Witch and the lead Vampire are strong, scary people but neither is monstrous. Lex has an affinity for the Vampire world and quickly becomes entangled in it. Where Scarlett held herself at the edge of the Old World, Lex pushes steadily into its heart.

I won't go into the plot because part of the fun is finding out who Lex is and what she's capable of but by the end of the book, Lex is set up to good deeper into the Old World and to cross paths with the characters from the Scarlett Bernard trilogy. I'm already looking forward to reading about what happens to her. show less

I enjoyed the first two books in this series "Boundary Crossed" and "Boundary Lines" for their originality, energy, strong characters and clever plots.

"Boundary Born" share all those attributes and manages to crank everything up a notch.
It carries straight on from "Boundary Lines" and expects the reader to know what happened in the first two books (which is no great burden as they're both fun reads).

This allows Melissa Olson quickly to take us on to new material that builds on and show more reshapes what we know about Lex, an ex-solider, who has recently learned that she is a Boundary Witch (a rare and despised type of witch that have an affinity with death), that her dead twin sister's daughter is a Null. Lex (an army nick-name because her surname is Luther) is working for the local Cardinal Vampire, Mavin and keeping secrets from her (large and close-knit) family about her true nature.

See what I mean? You have to have read the first two books.

"Boundary Born" starts with an attack that puts Lex's world under threat and is followed up by surprising news about her biological parents. Then things take a turn for the worse and it's clear there's a new Big Bad in town.

The plot is clever and skilfully revealed. Everything fits in neatly with the previous books and the promise for future books is enormous. The action scenes are graphic and the rules of magic are intricate and plausible.

What makes the book fly though is the quality of the characters and the relationships between them. Melissa Olson makes them into people, not just pieces on a chess board, and gives them some great lines. For example, at one point, Lex has been badly beaten and is covered in blood (this happens to her a lot) so she needs help cleaning up. Vampire boyfriend helps her stay on her feet and quips that this wasn't how he's imagined them showering together. Lex says that she never imagined them showering together because:

"Sex in the shower is like buying a convertible or getting a perm, it seems all fun and sexy in theory but what actually happens is discomfort and weird hair."

"Boundary Born is narrated by Kate Rudd, who does a superb job. Click on the SoundCloud link below to listen to a sample.

https://soundcloud.com/brilliance-audio/boundary-born-by-melissa-f-olson show less

"Blood Gamble" continues the walking disaster that is Scarlet Bernard's life as a Null: a human who cancels out the magic of supernaturals in her presence, vampires and werewolves become human and witches' spell bounce off her.

This book takes Scarlet out of LA, where she is supported by people she trusts, and into Las Vegas, a city she has a bad history with and where she has to fall back on her own resources. She is made more vulnerable by the fact that her cover story for being in Las show more Vegas is to attend her sister-in-law's belated hen-party weekend. This gives her enemies potential targets. It also gives us the fun of her seeing her suffer through various girly rituals that she has no wish to take part in.

It was refreshing to see Scarlet in a new environment. I thought the tacky-but-hard-to-look-away-from nature of Vegas was captured well. The plot was original, held a few surprises, gave me a few laughs and made just enough (mostly remote) use of well-loved characters from earlier books to keep continuity.

Scarlet did a lot of growing up in the last book, "Midnight Curse", finally pulling herself out from her victim status and becoming an actor in her own right. She continues that here, for the most part, acting independently and often quite aggressively. She is dragged into her past again by another Null that she met when she was a teenager and who she is sympathetic towards, despite his flaws because she sees that she could easily have become what he now is.

This is a well done, first person account, that works because Scarlet is a mostly ordinary, mostly nice person who keeps finding herself with life and death choices. What could be more engaging than that?

Read this if you're in the mood for an urban supernatural adventure that's heavy on snark and attitude that hides a heart of gold.

I recommend the audiobook version as Amy McFadden is the perfect narrator for Scarlet's books.

Try a sample for yourself by clicking on the link below.

https://soundcloud.com/brilliance-audio/blood-gamble-by-melissa-f-olson show less