Review: Not Much To It But Still A Nice Glimpse of the Elder Races World
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 06 18, 2012
Another pleasant little novella in Thea Harrison's Elder Races series. This one tells the story of the vampire Duncan and the medusa Seremela Telemar, both of whom have appeared briefly as minor characters in the full length Elder Races books. (WARNING ***PLOT AND CHARACTER SPOILERS FOLLOW***)The story opens with Seremela having moved to Florida to work for the ancient vampire Carling and her mate Rune (Drago's former sentinel) who have set up some sort of international consulting group. Her niece is in trouble (again) and it's up to Seremela to rescue her from "Devil's Gate", a lawless town that has sprung up in Nevada, near the town that was the subject of the last novella. Duncan works as Rune and Carling's attorney and insists on travelling with Seremela to help as he has become increasingly attracted to the beautiful and exotic medusa.As usual with these little novellas, there isn't much of a mystery. Duncan and Seremela rescue her tearful niece, Vetta, without too much difficulty. Both Duncan and Seremela are appealing characters. For a medusa, Seremela is like the girl next door but with snakes growing out of her head. Some of the scenes with the snakes were quirky fun as they are quite attracted to Duncan and find cute and creative ways to demonstrate their interest. However, there just wasn't a lot to this novella which made it hard to swallow the $2.66 price. In addition, while Duncan and Seremela are most definitely in love and Duncan is thinking rings and marriage at the close of the story, Harrison doesn't address that the virtually immortal Duncan and the very-much-not-immortal Seremela will only have about 100 years together, given that Seremela is about 380 years old and medusas only live to be around 500. So, it's a bit of a downer at the end to know that Duncan will be alone in what would be a fairly short amount of time to him. Finally, the box of tarot cards that made appearances in the earlier novellas (True ColorsandNatural Evil) is here as well and passed on to a dark fae that works for Tricks and Tiago so it looks like the next novella will give us a chance to see what's going on in the Dark Fae kingdom and how Tricks (now Queen Niniane) is fairing.