Review: Loved it!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 01 8, 2011
I love New Orleans. It's like no other city in the world. There's a rhythm and a spirit there that I've never encountered anywhere else. It's easy to break it down into its component parts and celebrate those: the food, the music, the architecture, the festivals. It's far more difficult to capture some essence of the whole, yet Nolan does in Devil's Eye.When I heard Kait Nolan had set her latest Mirus release in New Orleans, I knew I had to read it. The city is so often the subject of paranormal fiction that rarely manages to capture part of its greatest charm: that of a tightly knit Southern community that cares tremendously about its members. Ms. Nolan manages this quite nicely by depicting a wolf-shifter who's had to create his own version of pack and family of all Mirus races, and even a human or two, and the flesh and blood sister of one of his missing pack members. Along the way, Ms. Nolan offers us wonderfully accurate renditions of the city: the tense camraderie of a hurricane watch party; the edgy awe of the St. Louis' cemeteries after dark; a mixture of modern and colonial architecture; a lilting Cajun patois.In fact, it was the Cajun accent that got me. Mick, the wolf-shifter, hands a soaking wet protagonist a towel and says: "Here. This'll help a l'il bit."Oh, the rolling Cajun 'l, perfectly and casually captured. I fell in love with Mick right away. And stayed that way for the rest of the novel. Some demi-goddesses have all the luck.Nolan's writing is, as always, well-paced and deeply plotted. Her world building is meticulous. Her Mirus world is consistent, continuing some of the same tensions from Forsaken by Shadow, even though the characters are different. If anything, the story is a little too short. The novel ended with me wanting to know more. There are certainly interesting possibilities open for the lead characters as the novel ends, but perhaps we won't have to wait long for the next installment.